Joseph Lieberman

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I am pleased to join my colleague, Senator Collins, in introducing the ``Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Act of 2005. I am also delighted that Senators Coleman, Levin, and Carper will be joining us on this bill. This bill is the product of extensive work in the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to explore the risks of a possible terrorist attack on our chemical facilities, as well as the best means to guard against those risks. Since 9/11 opened our eyes to the threats we face on U.S. soil from Islamist terrorist groups, we have moved to improve security for many of the critical elements of our society and economy. But somehow we have not yet protected one of our greatest vulnerabilities the chemical sector. Chemicals are vital to many of the processes that feed us, heal us, and power our economy. Yet the very pervasiveness of the chemical sector makes it vulnerable to terrorism. Thousands of facilities throughout the country use or store lethal materials, often near large population centers. We know that terrorists are interested in targeting these facilities. The Congressional Research Service reports that during the 1990s, both international and domestic terrorists attempted to use explosives to release chemicals from manufacturing and storage facilities close to population centers. The Justice Department in 2002 described the threat posed by terrorists to chemical facilities as ``both real and credible,'' for the foreseeable future. Former White House Homeland Security Advisor Richard Falkenrath this spring told the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that although chemical facilities are a most serious homeland security vulnerability, the Federal Government has done almost nothing to secure them. Homeland Security expert Steve Flynn likened the Nation's 15,000 chemical facilities to ``15,000 weapons of mass destruction littered around the United States.'' Fortunately, the responsible players in the chemical industry have not waited for Federal legislation, and some of the leading trade groups have begun their own security programs or participated in some voluntary efforts led by DHS. Some chemical facilities are also subject to security regulation under the Maritime Transportation Security Act or the Bioterrorism Act of 2002. Yet these programs do not reach the full range of security matters addressed at the committee's hearings and in this legislation. More significant, far too many facilities that use extremely hazardous chemicals remain entirely outside the patchwork of laws, regulations, and self-protection now in place. For several years, legislation to require security enhancements at these chemical sites has foundered in Congress, bereft of true administration support or Congressional consensus. But I am hopeful that today marks a turning point that will culminate in successful passage of a robust chemical security bill. First, the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has worked on a bipartisan basis to build a foundation for this effort: through four hearings that explored the issues and possible solutions regarding chemical site security and through collaboration on this legislation that has already won strong bipartisan support on our Committee. Second, DHS has now clearly stated--in testimony to our committee-- that the current voluntary efforts are not sufficient and that the Department needs new legislative authority to regulate chemical site security. Third, responsible segments of the chemical industry--such as the American Chemistry Council--have recognized the need for a comprehensive national program to ensure adequate security across the entire chemical sector and called for Federal legislation. I welcome this engagement by industry and believe we can work together with them, as well as the administration, and all who are concerned about security, to forge an effective national program. This legislation is a forceful but pragmatic response to the challenge of chemical site security. It directs its greatest force and focus to those facilities that pose the highest risk in terms of potential loss of human life or other catastrophic results. It authorizes the Department of Homeland Security to initiate a thoroughgoing security program for thousands of critical chemical sites around the country. The Secretary would identify which facilities pose a meaningful risk due to terrorism concerns, and then require these facilities to conduct a vulnerability assessment and prepare a security plan and emergency response plan to address the results of this vulnerability analysis. Facilities within the program would submit these assessments and plans to DHS for review and approval. DHS would then work with the facilities to ensure the plans, and implementation, are adequate. Under a tiered system of requirements, those facilities that pose the greatest risk would face the most stringent security requirements as well as a speedier and more rigorous DHS review. The bill includes civil and criminal penalties for noncompliance and, ultimately, facilities may be ordered to shut down if they do not comply with DHS orders. This legislation recognizes that facilities will need flexibility to achieve security in the most efficient and effective manner. The bill also recognizes the work of the responsible chemical companies within the chemical sector and does not force those facilities to reinvent the wheel. Instead, the bill ensures that so long as an alternative security program's assessments and plans meet the bill's core requirements for vulnerability assessments and site security plans, facilities operating under those alternative security programs can submit these assessments and plans under the DHS program. However, where the assessments and plans do not meet the bill's core requirements, the Secretary will require appropriate modifications. Finally, the Secretary will judge all assessments and plans against the regulations promulgated under this bill. This legislation also recognizes that sometimes the best security will come not from adding guards and gates but from reexamining the way chemical operations are carried out in order to reduce the amount of hazardous substances on site, improve the way they are stored or processed or find safer substitutes for the chemicals themselves. These changes serve to make a facility less inviting as a target for terrorists, as well as limiting the loss of life or other damage if an attack does take place. They also have the added benefit of limiting the harm from an accidental release. This bill clearly requires facilities to look at the risks and consequences related to the dangerous chemicals on site and address those specific vulnerabilities in their security plan. And it includes these process changes among the menu of security measures that chemical facilities should examine when designing their security plans. We know that many facilities, and many security experts, already look to these less dangerous technologies as a potent and cost-effective way to improve security against a possible terror attack. But we also know that, for some facilities, there can be reluctance or structural impediments to looking at these technological solutions. That is why I feel this bill should go further and include more explicit requirements for chemical facilities to consider less dangerous technologies when they make the security enhancements required under this bill. In particular, the riskier facilities--some of which could endanger tens or hundreds of thousands of lives if attacked--should have to demonstrate that they have looked closely at options that would reduce the catastrophic consequences of a possible terrorist attack. We had a powerful example of such an adjustment close by: after 9/11 focused our attention on potential targets in our midst, Washington DC's water treatment facility ended the use of its potentially deadly liquid chlorine. This is not a question of forcing industry to conduct its operations off a Government-issued playbook. Companies would analyze for themselves whether there are less dangerous ways to conduct their business and would not be forced to implement any changes that were not feasible. But given the extraordinary risks involved, it makes little sense not to require companies to at least take a long hard look at some of the commonsense solutions that have been advocated or already adopted by others within the industry. Therefore, as this bill advances, I will seek to strengthen the requirements for facilities to carefully consider these safer technologies as a means to greater security. The bill creates structure within DHS to oversee this regulatory program and a regional network to help implement its provisions, particularly to help ensure adequate emergency response capabilities in the event of an attack on a chemical facility. There are also provisions to safeguard sensitive information that DHS receives from the chemical facilities, while at the same time requiring DHS to share and disclose information necessary for public safety and public accountability. The bill does not affect chemical facilities' obligations to make information available to the public under right-to- know laws or other regulatory programs, and it establishes a secure channel by which members of the public can submit information about potential problems regarding the security of chemical facilities. This bill also recognizes that Congress is not the only body that can and should help ensure the safety and security of the Nation's chemical facilities. States and localities have long regulated such facilities for various safety and environmental concerns. Since 9/11, some States have also moved to require security improvements at these facilities. These State and local protections are critical adjuncts to our effort at the Federal level, and I am pleased that this bill states clearly that it does not preempt State and local laws or regulations regarding the safety and security of chemical facilities. States and localities are free to enact more stringent chemical security legislation. Only if there is an absolute conflict, such that it is impossible for a facility to comply with both the Federal law and a State or local law or regulation on chemical security, would the Federal provision take precedence. The bill would not disrupt State and local safety and environmental law regarding chemical facilities, nor does it dislodge or alter the operation of State common law with respect to such facilities.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, it is my honor today to pay tribute and bid a fond farewell to my colleague and friend Senator Jon S. Corzine of New Jersey. Senator Corzine, as we know, will be leaving the Senate next month to serve as New Jersey's Governor, and before he leaves us to begin what I can only be certain will be a wildly successful and innovative tenure as New Jersey's chief executive, I thought it appropriate to take the time to celebrate not only Mr. Corzine's fine service in the Senate, but his inspiring life story as well. In many ways, Jon Corzine's life is an example of the American dream fulfilled. Mr. Corzine was born on New Year's Day, 1947, and grew up on his family's farm in Willey's Station, IL. His father ran the farm and sold insurance; his mother was a public school teacher. Through his own hard work and that of his family, Mr. Corzine attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1969. After graduating college, Mr. Corzine served his country by enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves, and he continued in the Reserves until 1975, rising to the rank of sergeant in his infantry unit. After Senator Corzine's active duty was up, he began what would become a long and successful career in the finance sector. His first job was with the Continental Illinois National Bank in Chicago, where he worked as a portfolio analyst. At the same time, Mr. Corzine began taking night classes at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, where he received his MBA in 1973. In 1975, after working briefly at a regional bank in Ohio, Mr. Corzine was recruited to go to work for the New York investment firm Goldman Sachs as a bond trader, beginning what would be a meteoritic rise through the company's ranks. After only 5 years, Mr. Corzine was named a partner in the firm. In 1994, Mr. Corzine became both the firm's chairman and chief executive officer. But the story doesn't end there for Mr. Corzine had a very successful tenure at the helm of Goldman Sachs. When he took over in 1994, the proud and respected firm was in a period of some decline. But Mr. Corzine and his team turned the company's fortunes upwards. During his 5 years as chief executive, Mr. Corzine also oversaw the firm's successful transition from a private partnership to a public company. While serving as chief executive, Mr. Corzine also demonstrated a passion for public service. Under his leadership, Goldman Sachs was a strong corporate citizen, expanding its community outreach and philanthropic programs. Mr. Corzine also chaired a Presidential commission that studied how capital budgeting could be used to increase Federal investment in education. It is this commitment to public service that I saw Jon Corzine bring to his work in the Senate every day. Elected in 2000 by the people of New Jersey, Senator Corzine has been a tireless advocate for corporate accountability, helping coauthor the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and has worked to protect our environment, where he has been a steadfast ally in the fights to prevent drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and to tackle climate change. On the international front, Senator Corzine has sponsored the Darfur Accountability act, an act I am proud to cosponsor, which seeks to address the terrible genocide currently occurring in the Darfur region of Sudan. What I will remember most about Senator Corzine's tenure is his commitment to strengthening our Nation's Homeland Security. Having worked with Senator Corzine on several homeland security issues, I know firsthand that he was determined to do everything in his power to protect the American people from another terrorist attack. Senator Corzine and I worked together in passing legislation that created the 9/11 Commission, whose service to the American people we are all well aware of. In addition, Senator Corzine has been a leader in legislative efforts to increase security at our Nation's chemical plants, which remain vulnerable to attack. Senator Corzine crafted strong legislation aimed at protecting these facilities, and I remain hopeful that Congress will act on this area of great vulnerability. I will continue to be inspired by the dedication Senator Corzine applied to this critical issue. Let me end my statement by taking the time to thank Jon Corzine, for his service in the Senate. I wish him, his daughter Jennifer, and his two sons, Josh and Jeffrey, nothing but the best for the future, and I look forward to seeing the fine things I know he will continue to do for the people of New Jersey, now as their Governor. Once again, thank you, Jon Corzine.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise to register, in the strongest possible terms, my objection to the inclusion of provisions authorizing oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve in the Department of Defense Appropriations conference report. I find it outrageous--and unacceptable--that after failing in their budget reconciliation ploy to open the Arctic wilderness to oil drilling, drilling proponents would now try to tamper with the Defense spending bill at a time when we have troops in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is bad policy and dragging this controversy into the Senate's conscientious efforts to ensure that our military effort is adequately funded at a time of war does not do right by our fighting men and women. It is equally outrageous that drilling proponents are attempting to exploit the Katrina-relief package included in the bill. Congress has an obligation to care for the victims of that devastating natural disaster and our fellow citizens deserve better than to have congressional efforts to provide for their needs undercut by such a desperate procedural scheme.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, it is my honor today to pay tribute and bid a fond farewell to my colleague and friend Senator Jon S. Corzine of New Jersey. Senator Corzine as we know will be leaving the Senate next month to serve as New Jersey's Governor, and before he leaves us to begin what I can only be certain will be a wildly successful and innovative tenure as New Jersey's chief executive, I thought it appropriate to take the time to celebrate not only Mr. Corzine's fine service in the Senate but his inspiring life story as well. In many ways, Jon Corzine's life is an example of the American dream fulfilled. Mr. Corzine was born on New Year's Day, 1947, and grew up on his family's farm in Willey's Station, IL. His father ran the farm and sold insurance; his mother was a public school teacher. Through his own hard work and that of his family, Mr. Corzine attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1969. After graduating college, Mr. Corzine served his country by enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves, and he continued in the Reserves until 1975, rising to the rank of sergeant in his infantry unit. After Senator Corzine's Active Duty was up, he began what would become a long and successful career in the finance sector. His first job was with the Continental Illinois National Bank in Chicago, where he worked as a portfolio analyst. At the same time, Mr. Corzine began taking night classes at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, where he received his MBA in 1973. In 1975, after working briefly at a regional bank in Ohio, Mr. Corzine was recruited to go to work for the New York investment firm Goldman Sachs as a bond trader, beginning what would be a meteoritic rise through the company's ranks. After only 5 years, Mr. Corzine was named a partner in the firm. In 1994, Mr. Corzine became both the firm's chairman and chief executive officer. Through hard work, Senator Corzine rose from his family's farm in rural Illinois to being the chief executive officer of a New York investment firm. But the story doesn't end there for Mr. Corzine had a very successful tenure at the helm of Goldman Sachs. When he took over in 1994, the proud and respected firm was in a period of some decline. But Mr. Corzine and his team turned the company's fortunes upwards. During his 5 years as chief executive, Mr. Corzine also oversaw the firm's successful transition from a private partnership to a public company. While serving as chief executive, Mr. Corzine also demonstrated a passion for public service. Under his leadership, Goldman Sachs was a strong corporate citizen, expanding its community outreach and philanthropic programs. Mr. Corzine also chaired a Presidential commission that studied how capital budgeting could be used to increase Federal investment in education. It is this commitment to public service that I saw Jon Corzine bring to his work in the Senate everyday. Elected in 2000 by the people of New Jersey, Senator Corzine has been a tireless advocate for corporate accountability, helping co-author the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and has worked to protect our environment, where he has been a steadfast ally in the fights to prevent drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and to tackle climate change. On the international front, Senator Corzine has sponsored the Darfur Accountability Act, an act I am proud to cosponsor, which seeks to address the terrible genocide currently occurring in the Darfur region of Sudan. What I will remember most about Senator Corzine's tenure is his commitment to strengthening our Nation's homeland security. Having worked with Senator Corzine on several homeland security issues, I know firsthand that he was determined to do everything in his power to protect the American people from another terrorist attack. Senator Corzine and I worked together in passing legislation that created the 9/11 Commission, whose service to the American people we are all well aware of. In addition, Senator Corzine has been a leader in legislative efforts to increase security at our Nation's chemical plants, which remain vulnerable to attack. Senator Corzine crafted strong legislation aimed at protecting these facilities, and I remain hopeful that Congress will act on this area of great vulnerability. I will continue to be inspired by the dedication Senator Corzine applied to this critical issue. Let me end my statement, Mr. President, by taking the time to thank Jon Corzine for his service in the Senate. I wish him, his wife Carla Katz, his daughter Jennifer, and his two sons, Josh and Jeffrey, nothing but the best for the future, and I look forward to seeing the fine things I know he will continue to do for the people of New Jersey, now as their Governor. Once again, thank you, Jon Corzine.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I thank the Chair. Mr. President, I came to the floor to thank my friend from Arizona not just for the legislation he has just introduced but for his characteristically courageous investigation of the events surrounding a particular lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, and the way in which they demonstrate the extent to which the system has gone out of control. The direct victims here, of course, are those whose money was essentially taken without cause, who were cheated. But the indirect, yet very real, victims of these abuses are the Members of Congress, and the extent to which there has been abuse of a classic and very critical function of our Government--lobbying--the extent to which there has been abuse of that role breaks the public trust in Congress itself. Disclosures, investigations such as Senator McCain and his committee have been involved in, fearlessly, are critically important, but these disclosures and revelations and abuses cry out to us now to take some legislative action. I have not had the opportunity yet to review fully the provisions of the legislation Senator McCain has introduced. I look forward to doing that over the recess. I hope that will put me in a position to join him as a sponsor of this legislation. It would be an honor and a privilege to work with him on this matter, as it has been to work on so many other matters. For today, I did not want this moment to go by without thanking him for coming forward with this legislation. It makes the point we are due--perhaps, in fact, overdue--for a review of our lobbying and disclosure laws. They need strengthening, and they need strengthening because it is right to do so and it is necessary to do so to restore the public trust in our Government. Mr. President, I am privileged to serve as the ranking member on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. In the normal course of the Senate rules, I believe this legislation would be referred to our committee, and there I look forward, along with the chairman, Senator Collins, to reviewing it. But in a personal sense, I want to work with Senator McCain and his staff and mine over the recess and hope that I can join him as a cosponsor of this legislation after the first of the year. I thank my friend, Senator Durbin, for yielding me these few moments. I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I thank the Chair. Mr. President, I came to the floor to thank my friend from Arizona not just for the legislation he has just introduced but for his characteristically courageous investigation of the events surrounding a particular lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, and the way in which they demonstrate the extent to which the system has gone out of control. The direct victims here, of course, are those whose money was essentially taken without cause, who were cheated. But the indirect, yet very real, victims of these abuses are the Members of Congress, and the extent to which there has been abuse of a classic and very critical function of our Government--lobbying--the extent to which there has been abuse of that role breaks the public trust in Congress itself. Disclosures, investigations such as Senator McCain and his committee have been involved in, fearlessly, are critically important, but these disclosures and revelations and abuses cry out to us now to take some legislative action. I have not had the opportunity yet to review fully the provisions of the legislation Senator McCain has introduced. I look forward to doing that over the recess. I hope that will put me in a position to join him as a sponsor of this legislation. It would be an honor and a privilege to work with him on this matter, as it has been to work on so many other matters. For today, I did not want this moment to go by without thanking him for coming forward with this legislation. It makes the point we are due--perhaps, in fact, overdue--for a review of our lobbying and disclosure laws. They need strengthening, and they need strengthening because it is right to do so and it is necessary to do so to restore the public trust in our Government. Mr. President, I am privileged to serve as the ranking member on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. In the normal course of the Senate rules, I believe this legislation would be referred to our committee, and there I look forward, along with the chairman, Senator Collins, to reviewing it. But in a personal sense, I want to work with Senator McCain and his staff and mine over the recess and hope that I can join him as a cosponsor of this legislation after the first of the year. I thank my friend, Senator Durbin, for yielding me these few moments. I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, today I rise with my colleague Senator Ensign to introduce the National Innovation Act, S. 2105. This Act is about building a new century of progress and prosperity for our Nation by spurring a new wave of American innovation--better known around the world as ``American ingenuity.'' Our Nation was founded by innovators. Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and many of our other Founding Fathers not only created a new republic, but in their spare time were inveterate experimenters and inventors, as well, who believed that innovation would be important to the growth and security of their new nation. The generations that followed took up the call. Whitney, Bell, Edison, Fulton, Morse, Ford, Colt, the Wrights--I don't even have to say their first names and you know who they are and what they did. Now we face a new century with new challenges--a global age where competition can come as easily from across an ocean as from across the street. We got a wake up call earlier this week about how tough the challenge is when it was announced that China had overtaken the United States as the world's largest exporter of high-tech products. According to statistics released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), China shipped $180 billion worth of such goods worldwide last year, exceeding U.S. exports valued at $149 billion. Even more significant, however, is the fact that the historical paradigm, one that has fueled much of our economic growth in the technology sector in this country, is quickly changing. China now imports far fewer components for tech goods, choosing instead to produce them itself. The OECD noted that between 2000 and 2004, the U.S. and EU shares of China's total imports in such components dropped from 27 to 12 percent. Instead of relying solely on its lower labor and production costs to assemble high-tech goods from components produced in places like the United States and Europe, China increasingly does it all itself now. Chinese scientists now develop many of the newest technologies. Their engineers now design the latest cutting-edge products, and their factories continue to assemble and spit out the goods, all the while steadily lowering costs. Many of the people involved are educated here or in Europe, though even that is changing, in part due to our restrictive immigration policies and technology transfer rules. If this continues unabated, the highest-end and best- paying jobs, key to the innovation-driven economy, could be found in Shanghai and not in American tech centers. In May of 2004, I released a White Paper on the topic of outsourcing. When I issued that White Paper, I stated that the first thing we should do was to stop blaming others and face the hard facts ourselves. Since that time, there are even more hard facts we need to face, including the statistics I just mentioned, all of which point to the urgent need for action if the American economy is going to adapt to the fundamental changes and growing competition in the global economy. Forrester Research Inc., a Cambridge, MA research firm that has been studying this issue, has estimated that by 2015, 3.3 million high-tech and service industry jobs will move overseas. Deloitte Consulting has estimated that approximately 2 million jobs in the financial services sector, which signifies nearly 15 percent of the industry's total, could move overseas in the next five years. But even more importantly, we are not just losing jobs. I fear we are beginning to lose critical pieces of our innovation infrastructure, and with them, our competitive edge in the global marketplace. What we always believed was our nation's ultimate competitive advantage--our high-end R&D and technological prowess--is increasingly under siege. I said in 2004, the outsourcing of jobs is just the tip of an economic iceberg that America is sailing towards. If the most recent statistics tell us anything, it's that we are even closer to that iceberg than ever before. Luckily, these developments have not gone unnoticed. Earlier this year, the Council on Competitiveness--drawing on the insights of many experts from industry and academia, and led by Sam Palmisano of IBM and Wayne Clough of Georgia Tech University--circulated a report with detailed recommendations on how to reinvigorate our innovation economy. The National Innovation Act, which Senator Ensign and I are introducing today, is based on the Council's recommendations. This is a strongly bipartisan bill, cosponsored by 16 of our colleagues in the Senate. Further, this bill is wholeheartedly supported by members of the business and academic communities in this country, many of whom are eager to see a reinvigoration of American ingenuity. A few exmples of these supportive statements include the following: George Scalise, President, Semiconductor Industry Association: ``U.S. leadership in technology has been the cornerstone of America's strategies for driving economic growth and ensuring national security. U.S. leadership is being challenged as never before. The National Innovation Act of 2005 addresses a number of the most critical issues involving technology leadership, especially those related to federal support for basic research. . . . We are especially pleased to support a bipartisan approach to ensuring U.S. technology leadership. The issues at stake--national security and our standard of living in the 21st century--are far too important to become entangled in partisan politics.'' Nicholas M. Donofrio, Executive Vice President, IBM Corporation: ``IBM applauds the introduction of the National Innovation Act of 2005 . . . Innovation underpins American economic growth and national security. In today's era of global opportunity and change, the rewards flow to those who innovate and turn disruptive shifts to their advantage. America has a long, proud history of recognizing when change is required and rising to the challenge. We are at such an inflection point today. The National Innovation Act of 2005 will create synergies among America's academic, business and government communities to ensure the future growth of the United States. I urge all Senators to support this legislation.'' Deborah L. Wince-Smith, President, Council on Competitiveness: ``On behalf of the Council's 180 CEOs, university presidents and labor leaders, I applaud the Senators' efforts and desire to ensure the United States remains the most competitive economic power in the world. We must, as a nation, innovate to compete and to prosper. This legislation is a critical step forward towards that goal.'' Dave McCurdy, CEO, Electronic Industries Association: ``EIA is thrilled by today's introduction of the National Innovation Act of 2005 (NIA), which includes so many measures that can help the U.S. remain an economic leader in the global high-tech economy. It is an ambitious piece of legislation that spans the policy spectrum, but with the commitment and support of policymakers from both sides of the aisle, we hope to see these important provisions quickly begin to take effect and fuel the U.S. innovation engine.'' John J. Castellani, President, Business Roundtable: ``On behalf of Business Roundtable, an association of 160 chief executive officers of America's leading companies, I applaud Senator Ensign and Senator Lieberman for their leadership on this critical issue. Maintaining our competitive edge in today's world economy is a top priority of the business community, and the National Innovation Act of 2005 is an important step in the right direction.'' The list of organizations and companies that have already endorsed this bill includes many of the major players in the field, companies and organizations working to keep America at the cutting edge of technology development, including the following: American Chemical Society, American Mathematical Society, ASTRA (Alliance for Science & Technology Research in America), Athena Alliance, Bell South, Business Roundtable, Center for Accelerating Innovation, Computing Research Association, Council on Competitiveness, Council of Scientific Society Presidents, Electronic Industries Alliance, Federation of American Scientists, IBM, IEEEE-USA, Progressive Policy Institute, Semiconductor Industry Association, SEMI North America, and TechNet. In addition, many academic institutions and organizations support our bill because they recognize the importance of expanding education in science, math, and engineering. We have received strong indications of support from the academic community, including the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) and Georgia Institute of Technology. While I won't describe every provision of this far-reaching bill today, a section-by-section summary accompanies this statement in the Record, I will say that the National Innovation Act addresses three broad categories--talent, investment, and infrastructure--all of which are key to America's regaining our competitive position among our trading partners. Number one, Talent: Innovation requires the incubation of curious minds. That means we absolutely must educate and train our science and engineering talent base that is essential to our continued global economic leadership. The number of jobs that require technical training is increasing at five times the rate of other occupations. To encourage more students to enter these technical professions, our legislation increases Federal support for graduate fellowships and trainee programs in science, math, and engineering by more than $800 million over 5 years. Specifically, the legislation expands the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program by 1,250 fellowships and extends the length of each fellowship from 3 to 5 years. These fellowships are portable fellowships which afford students the greatest flexibility in choosing graduate programs that fit their needs and interests. The legislation also expands the NSF Integrated Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program by 1,250 new traineeships. In the IGERT program, grants are awarded to universities to develop cross- disciplinary training programs for students in areas including science, math, engineering, and policy. The legislation also expands upon existing Department of Defense efforts and creates new programs in order to encourage more students to enter the fields of science, math, and engineering. Specifically, provisions are included to expand the Defense Department Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation (SMART) scholarship program by $41.3 million per year over five years and to expand the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship program by $45 million per year over five years. A new competitive traineeship program, which will initially include 80 students, is created to provide interdisciplinary training in science and engineering to students who are encouraged to work for at least ten years in the Department of Defense after graduation. This legislation also supports new and existing Professional Science Master's degree programs. These Master's programs typically try to provide cross-disciplinary training within the science, math, and engineering disciplines, and also to couple traditional technical disciplines with business, entrepreneurial, and business law training. Graduates of these programs will comprise a cadre of technical professionals with broad skills in both business and science that will give our industry an edge. If we are to develop talent at the graduate levels, we must also emphasize science, math, and engineering at the K-12 and undergraduate levels. The results from the International Student Assessment of 2003 showed that U.S. 15-year-olds performed below the international average in math and science literacy. In order to bolster our highly-skilled science and engineering workforce, we must improve performance in our elementary, middle, and high schools. Recognizing that new approaches must be realized, this legislation establishes a grant program of $10 million in 2007 and $20 million in 2008 and 2009 to help primary and secondary schools develop new experientially-based teaching techniques in math and science. It further addresses the issue of improving talent in scientific disciplines by expanding the existing Technology Talent program to the scope originally intended. The Technology Talent program provides competitive grants to undergraduate universities to develop new methods of increasing the number of students earning degrees in science, math, and engineering. It is essential that we increase the number of college graduates with the skills to contribute to the science and technology workforce, yet this program has never been fully funded. Number two, Investment: Great ideas need research money if they are to move from imagination to market. But, federal R&D spending as a percentage of GDP has been in steady decline since the mid-1960s. It is less than half of what it was then. This bill bolsters the mission of the National Science Foundation (NSF) by more than doubling its research budget from $4.8 billion in 2004 to nearly $10 billion in 2011. Support for NSF is essential as it funds the full range of scientific disciplines and it encourages multidisciplinary approaches to problem solving. When it was created in 1950, Congress envisioned NSF as one of the primary catalysts for research ``to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; [and] to secure the national defense.'' In order for NSF to continue to meet our tremendous needs in all these areas, which notably remain as vital today as they did back then, it needs more funding. At the same time, we must recognize that we, as a country, face difficult choices in how we allocate our resources. Hard choices may have to be made, but we cannot avoid the reality that an investment such as the increase in NSF's research budget that our bill calls for today, is absolutely necessary if we are to generate the talent base we need to remain competitive. It is my belief that this investment will pay vast dividends in the long run for the American people and for the American economy. I also believe we will pay dearly if this investment is not made soon. Congress is making steady progress toward finding reasonable ways to accommodate the needs of our five major research agencies. Our bill concentrates on two agencies: we double the authorization for NSF and we ask the Department of Defense (DOD) to spend 3 percent of its budget on science and technology, DOD's 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3, programs consistent with Defense Science Board recommendations. The research budget for life sciences at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been doubled in recent years and this legislation attempts to bring research in the physical sciences up to the same high level of funding. A major increase for NASA science research is now under consideration in conference and the Congress passed a significant increase in the authorization for Energy Department Science research as part of the energy bill this summer. So, our bill addresses the remaining top R&D agencies--NSF and DOD. Our bill also creates an ``Innovation Acceleration Grants'' program to stimulate high-risk research by urging federal research agencies to allocate at least 3 percent of their current R&D budget to breakthrough research--the kind of research that gave us fiber optics, the Internet and countless other technologies relied on every day in this country and around the world. We anticipate this funding would be used for ``grand challenges,'' for what is sometimes referred to as ``connected'' or ``translational'' research, which moves from fundamental discoveries through the development and procurement stages. We also anticipate that agencies would step outside the peer review approach, which can be too cautious, and empower talented program managers to drive novel and promising ideas forward. While it doesn't mandate that these agencies spend at least 3 percent of their budgets on high-risk frontier research projects, this provision sets a realistic and reasonable strategic goal. It is our hope and expectation that agencies will view the 3 percent allocation as a starting point and will take the initiative to expand from there. The Innovation Acceleration Grants program is designed to be a streamlined mechanism to support those grants that are making progress and not support those that are floundering. The program has built-in and specially-designed metrics to ensure that granting agencies closely monitor the projects they support, renewing those with strong performance and phasing out those that don't show enough real promise for the types of cutting-edge advancements that are truly innovative. It is important that it is designed in this manner because a cautious approach to these issues cannot work. In order to face the challenge, we need to take risks and be patient. However, in an environment of increasingly tight fiscal pressures, we also must recognize that risk taking can, and often does, lead to dead ends. While many high-risk projects may fail, those that succeed can bring tremendous benefit. The urgency of the threats we face today warrants a balanced approach. We must continue to encourage the groundbreaking experimentation, tinkering and longer-term outlook that made this country great. But we also must continue to take stock of our progress and make sure we are heading toward the ultimate goal of reestablishing the foundational elements of our tremendous successes over the last 50 years, and more. Switching gears briefly, I think it is also important to note that the government cannot do this alone. The private sector in this country needs to continue to lead the charge. Private sector investment in research in this country, after a sharp rise in the 90's, has been eroding in recent years in part because companies have moved some R&D operations outside the United States. About $17 billion a year in R&D now flows overseas to nations like China and India. And as that research money leaves our shores, the high-skilled 21st century jobs we need to compete sail away with them. Our bill tries to help stem the tide by making the current Research and Experimentation (R&E) tax credit permanent and extending it to a greater number of enterprises; the same provision that appears in the Invest in America Act of 2005, sponsored by Senators Hatch and Baucus with 44 bipartisan cosponsors. These two Senators deserve the credit on this. We are simply trying to emphasize their efforts. Making the credit permanent allows our private entrepreneurial spirit to continue to drive the economic growth of this great nation and at the same time ensures that other countries like China do not lure away our talent and investment, and ultimately the innovation that comes from them. It gives our companies a powerful and reliable long-term incentive to include domestic R&D as a significant component of their strategic plans. Since the original enactment of the research credit in 1981, a public-private partnership has developed, through which the federal government has worked with businesses of all sizes to ensure that research expenditures continue to be made here in the United States. The reward has been the creation of many innovative technologies, well- paying jobs, and an increased growth rate in our economy. The importance of this effort cannot be understated. At the same time that firms are investing more money in R&D, they must improve their ability to manage the technological innovations that result from this research. The emerging area of ``service science'' refers to both research and training regimens that are now starting to develop and to teach individuals how to apply technology to solving complex problems in the service and industrial sector. Eighty percent of our economy is service-based, yet we do very little R&D in this area. We now face intense service competition from countries like India, taking advantage of global IT systems. If we don't improve our services productivity, increasingly we won't be able to compete. This legislation asks the Director of the National Science Foundation to conduct a study for Congress on how the federal government should best support service science through research, education, and training. Number three, Infrastructure: Once we have helped assure the education foundation to give people the basic skills they need to use their creativity, and the resources they need to support their experimentation, we must then reinvent and transform our manufacturing processes and technologies so that we can secure the gains from the fruits of all this labor. In this era of tough international competition, if we don't manufacture the goods we innovate here in the U.S., we will forfeit our global economic leadership and our children's prosperity to other nations who can. To help facilitate this important goal, our legislation takes several steps. First, the bill authorizes creates federally-funded and complementary advanced manufacturing programs at the Departments of Commerce and Defense. The development and implementation of state-of-the-art advanced manufacturing systems does not happen overnight, nor can it be done alone. The goal of this new program is to, again, establish a public-private R&D partnership which enables risk taking and creativity to generate new processes and technologies. These new processes and technologies will give us the productivity breakthroughs we need to maintain our manufacturing competitiveness. I continue to believe in the spirit of American ingenuity--if given the chance and the tools to succeed, we will. This legislation also creates the Test Beds of Excellence program, which is designed test and refine these new processes and technologies in a real manufacturing setting once they have been developed. Then, we ask the Manufacturing Extension Program to help disseminate this new innovative knowledge throughout to manufacturing base, including to the many small and mid-sized companies that will be key to our growth. The Test Beds program is a competitive one and, as in the case of the Innovation Acceleration Grants program and other important features of this legislation, it is designed to self-scrutinize and adapt to the constantly changing needs of our manufacturing sector. In addition to the effort at the Department of Commerce, our bill asks the Department of Defense to work with the private sector to identify and accelerate the transition of advanced manufacturing technologies and processes that will enable us to maintain our technological edge on the battlefield. The Department of Defense relies on innovation, and the bill seeks to expand the Department's traditional manufacturing sector work in this area. An additional motivating factor within the Department of Defense is the inherent security risk associated with using certain overseas suppliers. American manufacturing must remain competitive in order to meet the needs of our military in a timely fashion. These steps will go a long way toward revitalizing our manufacturing system into a system that is seamlessly integrated with our other efforts to boost American innovation through education and research. Our bill goes further, recognizing that innovation fundamentally occurs not at the national level, but at the local and regional levels. Certainly there are many lessons to be learned from the rise of Silicon Valley and other similar regions that have sprung up all over this country as centers for high-tech growth. Our competitors, China, India, Israel and many others, have already begun to emulate the success we have achieved in this way. These clusters have developed in areas of the country where educational and research institutions, together with creative elements of the private sector, have partnered to create an environment conducive to innovation. Our bill encourages the development of more regional clusters (``hot spots'') of technology innovation throughout the United States. These hot spots spur growth in local economies and also contribute to progress on a national scale. We don't try to impose these from above, from the national level. These must start at the local level to work. But, the federal government can help local communities identify successful models and the right metrics. The Secretary of Commerce will publish a ``Guide to Developing Successful Regional Innovation Hot Spots'' in order to share successful strategies in the formation and development of regional clusters. Finally, it is imperative that the executive branch take a strong role in leading and coordinating the broad initiative outlined in this legislation. To help guide progress in all three of the important areas I have outlined, this bill creates a President's Council on Innovation. The goal of the President's Council is to develop a comprehensive national innovation agenda and coordinate all federal efforts related to this agenda. In consultation with the Office of Management and Budget, this Council would develop and use metrics to assess the impact of existing and proposed laws that affect innovation in the United States. In addition, the Council would help to coordinate the various federal efforts that must be spread among many agencies that support innovation, and it would submit an annual report to the President and to the Congress on how the Federal Government can best support innovation. This effort cries out for much better coordination and collaboration than exist now. Why the White House? These issues must be addressed at the highest levels and in a decisive and organized way to achieve success. The National Innovation Act is organized into five titles, intentionally reflecting the Senate committees of jurisdiction in the subject areas of each title. Title I, ``Innovation Promotion'' falls within the purview of the Commerce Committee. Title II, dealing with science, education and healthcare programs, covers subjects within the jurisdiction of the Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee. Title III, providing tax incentives to promote innovation, comes within the Finance Committee jurisdiction. Title IV covers Department of Defense programs and would fall within the Armed Services Committee jurisdiction. Title V, which touches on immigration, patent reform, and possible barriers to innovation, would be within the Judiciary Committee purview. The issues of immigration, health care information technology, and patent reform are reflected in this bill as Sense of Congress provisions, because we recognize that the committees of jurisdiction are already working on and moving in these areas and we don't want to get in their way. However, the bill cites these moving issues to mark the importance of considering how legislation on these issues may affect our economy's ability to remain competitive. The provision for an objective National Academy study on barriers to innovation would allow Congress to understand how legal and numerous other structural aspects of the U.S. economy may affect our ability to be innovative. From the 18th century Franklin stove to the 20th century personal computer, the United States has long been the leader in the technology and innovation that created jobs, wealth, and an ever-increasing standard of living for our people. We call it American ingenuity. It's time to take that native ingenuity and build a new century of progress for America. I ask unanimous consent that a section-by-section analysis of the National Innovation Act, a short summary of the legislation, and statements of support for this legislation be printed in the Record.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, today I rise with my colleague Senator Ensign to introduce the National Innovation Act, S. 2105. This Act is about building a new century of progress and prosperity for our Nation by spurring a new wave of American innovation--better known around the world as ``American ingenuity.'' Our Nation was founded by innovators. Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and many of our other Founding Fathers not only created a new republic, but in their spare time were inveterate experimenters and inventors, as well, who believed that innovation would be important to the growth and security of their new nation. The generations that followed took up the call. Whitney, Bell, Edison, Fulton, Morse, Ford, Colt, the Wrights--I don't even have to say their first names and you know who they are and what they did. Now we face a new century with new challenges--a global age where competition can come as easily from across an ocean as from across the street. We got a wake up call earlier this week about how tough the challenge is when it was announced that China had overtaken the United States as the world's largest exporter of high-tech products. According to statistics released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), China shipped $180 billion worth of such goods worldwide last year, exceeding U.S. exports valued at $149 billion. Even more significant, however, is the fact that the historical paradigm, one that has fueled much of our economic growth in the technology sector in this country, is quickly changing. China now imports far fewer components for tech goods, choosing instead to produce them itself. The OECD noted that between 2000 and 2004, the U.S. and EU shares of China's total imports in such components dropped from 27 to 12 percent. Instead of relying solely on its lower labor and production costs to assemble high-tech goods from components produced in places like the United States and Europe, China increasingly does it all itself now. Chinese scientists now develop many of the newest technologies. Their engineers now design the latest cutting-edge products, and their factories continue to assemble and spit out the goods, all the while steadily lowering costs. Many of the people involved are educated here or in Europe, though even that is changing, in part due to our restrictive immigration policies and technology transfer rules. If this continues unabated, the highest-end and best- paying jobs, key to the innovation-driven economy, could be found in Shanghai and not in American tech centers. In May of 2004, I released a White Paper on the topic of outsourcing. When I issued that White Paper, I stated that the first thing we should do was to stop blaming others and face the hard facts ourselves. Since that time, there are even more hard facts we need to face, including the statistics I just mentioned, all of which point to the urgent need for action if the American economy is going to adapt to the fundamental changes and growing competition in the global economy. Forrester Research Inc., a Cambridge, MA research firm that has been studying this issue, has estimated that by 2015, 3.3 million high-tech and service industry jobs will move overseas. Deloitte Consulting has estimated that approximately 2 million jobs in the financial services sector, which signifies nearly 15 percent of the industry's total, could move overseas in the next five years. But even more importantly, we are not just losing jobs. I fear we are beginning to lose critical pieces of our innovation infrastructure, and with them, our competitive edge in the global marketplace. What we always believed was our nation's ultimate competitive advantage--our high-end R&D and technological prowess--is increasingly under siege. I said in 2004, the outsourcing of jobs is just the tip of an economic iceberg that America is sailing towards. If the most recent statistics tell us anything, it's that we are even closer to that iceberg than ever before. Luckily, these developments have not gone unnoticed. Earlier this year, the Council on Competitiveness--drawing on the insights of many experts from industry and academia, and led by Sam Palmisano of IBM and Wayne Clough of Georgia Tech University--circulated a report with detailed recommendations on how to reinvigorate our innovation economy. The National Innovation Act, which Senator Ensign and I are introducing today, is based on the Council's recommendations. This is a strongly bipartisan bill, cosponsored by 16 of our colleagues in the Senate. Further, this bill is wholeheartedly supported by members of the business and academic communities in this country, many of whom are eager to see a reinvigoration of American ingenuity. A few exmples of these supportive statements include the following: George Scalise, President, Semiconductor Industry Association: ``U.S. leadership in technology has been the cornerstone of America's strategies for driving economic growth and ensuring national security. U.S. leadership is being challenged as never before. The National Innovation Act of 2005 addresses a number of the most critical issues involving technology leadership, especially those related to federal support for basic research. . . . We are especially pleased to support a bipartisan approach to ensuring U.S. technology leadership. The issues at stake--national security and our standard of living in the 21st century--are far too important to become entangled in partisan politics.'' Nicholas M. Donofrio, Executive Vice President, IBM Corporation: ``IBM applauds the introduction of the National Innovation Act of 2005 . . . Innovation underpins American economic growth and national security. In today's era of global opportunity and change, the rewards flow to those who innovate and turn disruptive shifts to their advantage. America has a long, proud history of recognizing when change is required and rising to the challenge. We are at such an inflection point today. The National Innovation Act of 2005 will create synergies among America's academic, business and government communities to ensure the future growth of the United States. I urge all Senators to support this legislation.'' Deborah L. Wince-Smith, President, Council on Competitiveness: ``On behalf of the Council's 180 CEOs, university presidents and labor leaders, I applaud the Senators' efforts and desire to ensure the United States remains the most competitive economic power in the world. We must, as a nation, innovate to compete and to prosper. This legislation is a critical step forward towards that goal.'' Dave McCurdy, CEO, Electronic Industries Association: ``EIA is thrilled by today's introduction of the National Innovation Act of 2005 (NIA), which includes so many measures that can help the U.S. remain an economic leader in the global high-tech economy. It is an ambitious piece of legislation that spans the policy spectrum, but with the commitment and support of policymakers from both sides of the aisle, we hope to see these important provisions quickly begin to take effect and fuel the U.S. innovation engine.'' John J. Castellani, President, Business Roundtable: ``On behalf of Business Roundtable, an association of 160 chief executive officers of America's leading companies, I applaud Senator Ensign and Senator Lieberman for their leadership on this critical issue. Maintaining our competitive edge in today's world economy is a top priority of the business community, and the National Innovation Act of 2005 is an important step in the right direction.'' The list of organizations and companies that have already endorsed this bill includes many of the major players in the field, companies and organizations working to keep America at the cutting edge of technology development, including the following: American Chemical Society, American Mathematical Society, ASTRA (Alliance for Science & Technology Research in America), Athena Alliance, Bell South, Business Roundtable, Center for Accelerating Innovation, Computing Research Association, Council on Competitiveness, Council of Scientific Society Presidents, Electronic Industries Alliance, Federation of American Scientists, IBM, IEEEE-USA, Progressive Policy Institute, Semiconductor Industry Association, SEMI North America, and TechNet. In addition, many academic institutions and organizations support our bill because they recognize the importance of expanding education in science, math, and engineering. We have received strong indications of support from the academic community, including the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) and Georgia Institute of Technology. While I won't describe every provision of this far-reaching bill today, a section-by-section summary accompanies this statement in the Record, I will say that the National Innovation Act addresses three broad categories--talent, investment, and infrastructure--all of which are key to America's regaining our competitive position among our trading partners. Number one, Talent: Innovation requires the incubation of curious minds. That means we absolutely must educate and train our science and engineering talent base that is essential to our continued global economic leadership. The number of jobs that require technical training is increasing at five times the rate of other occupations. To encourage more students to enter these technical professions, our legislation increases Federal support for graduate fellowships and trainee programs in science, math, and engineering by more than $800 million over 5 years. Specifically, the legislation expands the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program by 1,250 fellowships and extends the length of each fellowship from 3 to 5 years. These fellowships are portable fellowships which afford students the greatest flexibility in choosing graduate programs that fit their needs and interests. The legislation also expands the NSF Integrated Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program by 1,250 new traineeships. In the IGERT program, grants are awarded to universities to develop cross- disciplinary training programs for students in areas including science, math, engineering, and policy. The legislation also expands upon existing Department of Defense efforts and creates new programs in order to encourage more students to enter the fields of science, math, and engineering. Specifically, provisions are included to expand the Defense Department Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation (SMART) scholarship program by $41.3 million per year over five years and to expand the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship program by $45 million per year over five years. A new competitive traineeship program, which will initially include 80 students, is created to provide interdisciplinary training in science and engineering to students who are encouraged to work for at least ten years in the Department of Defense after graduation. This legislation also supports new and existing Professional Science Master's degree programs. These Master's programs typically try to provide cross-disciplinary training within the science, math, and engineering disciplines, and also to couple traditional technical disciplines with business, entrepreneurial, and business law training. Graduates of these programs will comprise a cadre of technical professionals with broad skills in both business and science that will give our industry an edge. If we are to develop talent at the graduate levels, we must also emphasize science, math, and engineering at the K-12 and undergraduate levels. The results from the International Student Assessment of 2003 showed that U.S. 15-year-olds performed below the international average in math and science literacy. In order to bolster our highly-skilled science and engineering workforce, we must improve performance in our elementary, middle, and high schools. Recognizing that new approaches must be realized, this legislation establishes a grant program of $10 million in 2007 and $20 million in 2008 and 2009 to help primary and secondary schools develop new experientially-based teaching techniques in math and science. It further addresses the issue of improving talent in scientific disciplines by expanding the existing Technology Talent program to the scope originally intended. The Technology Talent program provides competitive grants to undergraduate universities to develop new methods of increasing the number of students earning degrees in science, math, and engineering. It is essential that we increase the number of college graduates with the skills to contribute to the science and technology workforce, yet this program has never been fully funded. Number two, Investment: Great ideas need research money if they are to move from imagination to market. But, federal R&D spending as a percentage of GDP has been in steady decline since the mid-1960s. It is less than half of what it was then. This bill bolsters the mission of the National Science Foundation (NSF) by more than doubling its research budget from $4.8 billion in 2004 to nearly $10 billion in 2011. Support for NSF is essential as it funds the full range of scientific disciplines and it encourages multidisciplinary approaches to problem solving. When it was created in 1950, Congress envisioned NSF as one of the primary catalysts for research ``to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; [and] to secure the national defense.'' In order for NSF to continue to meet our tremendous needs in all these areas, which notably remain as vital today as they did back then, it needs more funding. At the same time, we must recognize that we, as a country, face difficult choices in how we allocate our resources. Hard choices may have to be made, but we cannot avoid the reality that an investment such as the increase in NSF's research budget that our bill calls for today, is absolutely necessary if we are to generate the talent base we need to remain competitive. It is my belief that this investment will pay vast dividends in the long run for the American people and for the American economy. I also believe we will pay dearly if this investment is not made soon. Congress is making steady progress toward finding reasonable ways to accommodate the needs of our five major research agencies. Our bill concentrates on two agencies: we double the authorization for NSF and we ask the Department of Defense (DOD) to spend 3 percent of its budget on science and technology, DOD's 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3, programs consistent with Defense Science Board recommendations. The research budget for life sciences at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been doubled in recent years and this legislation attempts to bring research in the physical sciences up to the same high level of funding. A major increase for NASA science research is now under consideration in conference and the Congress passed a significant increase in the authorization for Energy Department Science research as part of the energy bill this summer. So, our bill addresses the remaining top R&D agencies--NSF and DOD. Our bill also creates an ``Innovation Acceleration Grants'' program to stimulate high-risk research by urging federal research agencies to allocate at least 3 percent of their current R&D budget to breakthrough research--the kind of research that gave us fiber optics, the Internet and countless other technologies relied on every day in this country and around the world. We anticipate this funding would be used for ``grand challenges,'' for what is sometimes referred to as ``connected'' or ``translational'' research, which moves from fundamental discoveries through the development and procurement stages. We also anticipate that agencies would step outside the peer review approach, which can be too cautious, and empower talented program managers to drive novel and promising ideas forward. While it doesn't mandate that these agencies spend at least 3 percent of their budgets on high-risk frontier research projects, this provision sets a realistic and reasonable strategic goal. It is our hope and expectation that agencies will view the 3 percent allocation as a starting point and will take the initiative to expand from there. The Innovation Acceleration Grants program is designed to be a streamlined mechanism to support those grants that are making progress and not support those that are floundering. The program has built-in and specially-designed metrics to ensure that granting agencies closely monitor the projects they support, renewing those with strong performance and phasing out those that don't show enough real promise for the types of cutting-edge advancements that are truly innovative. It is important that it is designed in this manner because a cautious approach to these issues cannot work. In order to face the challenge, we need to take risks and be patient. However, in an environment of increasingly tight fiscal pressures, we also must recognize that risk taking can, and often does, lead to dead ends. While many high-risk projects may fail, those that succeed can bring tremendous benefit. The urgency of the threats we face today warrants a balanced approach. We must continue to encourage the groundbreaking experimentation, tinkering and longer-term outlook that made this country great. But we also must continue to take stock of our progress and make sure we are heading toward the ultimate goal of reestablishing the foundational elements of our tremendous successes over the last 50 years, and more. Switching gears briefly, I think it is also important to note that the government cannot do this alone. The private sector in this country needs to continue to lead the charge. Private sector investment in research in this country, after a sharp rise in the 90's, has been eroding in recent years in part because companies have moved some R&D operations outside the United States. About $17 billion a year in R&D now flows overseas to nations like China and India. And as that research money leaves our shores, the high-skilled 21st century jobs we need to compete sail away with them. Our bill tries to help stem the tide by making the current Research and Experimentation (R&E) tax credit permanent and extending it to a greater number of enterprises; the same provision that appears in the Invest in America Act of 2005, sponsored by Senators Hatch and Baucus with 44 bipartisan cosponsors. These two Senators deserve the credit on this. We are simply trying to emphasize their efforts. Making the credit permanent allows our private entrepreneurial spirit to continue to drive the economic growth of this great nation and at the same time ensures that other countries like China do not lure away our talent and investment, and ultimately the innovation that comes from them. It gives our companies a powerful and reliable long-term incentive to include domestic R&D as a significant component of their strategic plans. Since the original enactment of the research credit in 1981, a public-private partnership has developed, through which the federal government has worked with businesses of all sizes to ensure that research expenditures continue to be made here in the United States. The reward has been the creation of many innovative technologies, well- paying jobs, and an increased growth rate in our economy. The importance of this effort cannot be understated. At the same time that firms are investing more money in R&D, they must improve their ability to manage the technological innovations that result from this research. The emerging area of ``service science'' refers to both research and training regimens that are now starting to develop and to teach individuals how to apply technology to solving complex problems in the service and industrial sector. Eighty percent of our economy is service-based, yet we do very little R&D in this area. We now face intense service competition from countries like India, taking advantage of global IT systems. If we don't improve our services productivity, increasingly we won't be able to compete. This legislation asks the Director of the National Science Foundation to conduct a study for Congress on how the federal government should best support service science through research, education, and training. Number three, Infrastructure: Once we have helped assure the education foundation to give people the basic skills they need to use their creativity, and the resources they need to support their experimentation, we must then reinvent and transform our manufacturing processes and technologies so that we can secure the gains from the fruits of all this labor. In this era of tough international competition, if we don't manufacture the goods we innovate here in the U.S., we will forfeit our global economic leadership and our children's prosperity to other nations who can. To help facilitate this important goal, our legislation takes several steps. First, the bill authorizes creates federally-funded and complementary advanced manufacturing programs at the Departments of Commerce and Defense. The development and implementation of state-of-the-art advanced manufacturing systems does not happen overnight, nor can it be done alone. The goal of this new program is to, again, establish a public-private R&D partnership which enables risk taking and creativity to generate new processes and technologies. These new processes and technologies will give us the productivity breakthroughs we need to maintain our manufacturing competitiveness. I continue to believe in the spirit of American ingenuity--if given the chance and the tools to succeed, we will. This legislation also creates the Test Beds of Excellence program, which is designed test and refine these new processes and technologies in a real manufacturing setting once they have been developed. Then, we ask the Manufacturing Extension Program to help disseminate this new innovative knowledge throughout to manufacturing base, including to the many small and mid-sized companies that will be key to our growth. The Test Beds program is a competitive one and, as in the case of the Innovation Acceleration Grants program and other important features of this legislation, it is designed to self-scrutinize and adapt to the constantly changing needs of our manufacturing sector. In addition to the effort at the Department of Commerce, our bill asks the Department of Defense to work with the private sector to identify and accelerate the transition of advanced manufacturing technologies and processes that will enable us to maintain our technological edge on the battlefield. The Department of Defense relies on innovation, and the bill seeks to expand the Department's traditional manufacturing sector work in this area. An additional motivating factor within the Department of Defense is the inherent security risk associated with using certain overseas suppliers. American manufacturing must remain competitive in order to meet the needs of our military in a timely fashion. These steps will go a long way toward revitalizing our manufacturing system into a system that is seamlessly integrated with our other efforts to boost American innovation through education and research. Our bill goes further, recognizing that innovation fundamentally occurs not at the national level, but at the local and regional levels. Certainly there are many lessons to be learned from the rise of Silicon Valley and other similar regions that have sprung up all over this country as centers for high-tech growth. Our competitors, China, India, Israel and many others, have already begun to emulate the success we have achieved in this way. These clusters have developed in areas of the country where educational and research institutions, together with creative elements of the private sector, have partnered to create an environment conducive to innovation. Our bill encourages the development of more regional clusters (``hot spots'') of technology innovation throughout the United States. These hot spots spur growth in local economies and also contribute to progress on a national scale. We don't try to impose these from above, from the national level. These must start at the local level to work. But, the federal government can help local communities identify successful models and the right metrics. The Secretary of Commerce will publish a ``Guide to Developing Successful Regional Innovation Hot Spots'' in order to share successful strategies in the formation and development of regional clusters. Finally, it is imperative that the executive branch take a strong role in leading and coordinating the broad initiative outlined in this legislation. To help guide progress in all three of the important areas I have outlined, this bill creates a President's Council on Innovation. The goal of the President's Council is to develop a comprehensive national innovation agenda and coordinate all federal efforts related to this agenda. In consultation with the Office of Management and Budget, this Council would develop and use metrics to assess the impact of existing and proposed laws that affect innovation in the United States. In addition, the Council would help to coordinate the various federal efforts that must be spread among many agencies that support innovation, and it would submit an annual report to the President and to the Congress on how the Federal Government can best support innovation. This effort cries out for much better coordination and collaboration than exist now. Why the White House? These issues must be addressed at the highest levels and in a decisive and organized way to achieve success. The National Innovation Act is organized into five titles, intentionally reflecting the Senate committees of jurisdiction in the subject areas of each title. Title I, ``Innovation Promotion'' falls within the purview of the Commerce Committee. Title II, dealing with science, education and healthcare programs, covers subjects within the jurisdiction of the Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee. Title III, providing tax incentives to promote innovation, comes within the Finance Committee jurisdiction. Title IV covers Department of Defense programs and would fall within the Armed Services Committee jurisdiction. Title V, which touches on immigration, patent reform, and possible barriers to innovation, would be within the Judiciary Committee purview. The issues of immigration, health care information technology, and patent reform are reflected in this bill as Sense of Congress provisions, because we recognize that the committees of jurisdiction are already working on and moving in these areas and we don't want to get in their way. However, the bill cites these moving issues to mark the importance of considering how legislation on these issues may affect our economy's ability to remain competitive. The provision for an objective National Academy study on barriers to innovation would allow Congress to understand how legal and numerous other structural aspects of the U.S. economy may affect our ability to be innovative. From the 18th century Franklin stove to the 20th century personal computer, the United States has long been the leader in the technology and innovation that created jobs, wealth, and an ever-increasing standard of living for our people. We call it American ingenuity. It's time to take that native ingenuity and build a new century of progress for America. I ask unanimous consent that a section-by-section analysis of the National Innovation Act, a short summary of the legislation, and statements of support for this legislation be printed in the Record.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, because of a severe head cold I decided, after a telephone discussion with the minority leader, not to attempt to travel on a so-called redeye flight last night from the west coast to arrive this morning back in Washington to vote on 3 motions to instruct conferees. Had I been present, I would like the record to indicate that I would have voted for the motions by Senators Harkin, Carper, and Baucus. I note that on none of these votes would my vote have affected the outcome; all passed by substantial margins. I want to inform my colleagues that I plan to return by another redeye flight leaving tonight for votes Thursday.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, today, Senator Cochran, Senator Carper, Senator Hutchison, and I are introducing the American Center for CURES Act of 2005, which would establish the American Center for Cures, within the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The purpose of the Center would be to bring promising and novel diagnostics, therapies, drugs, and tools to treat disease faster to the public. We continue to face significant health challenges. In the US today, chronic diseases account for 7 out of 10 deaths, with the major killers being heart attack, cancer and stroke. Seventy percent of the $1.7 trillion dollars we spend on healthcare each year goes to chronic disease care. Around the world, HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria kill 4, 3, and 2 million people a year. On the horizon are emerging manmade and natural threats such as SARS, flu and bioterrorism. There are other diseases that we need better treatments and cures for, but that we do not devote enough attention to. Diseases of social stigma, such as depression, which is the most frequent reason people visit their physician, and seizure disorder, which is the primary neurological disorder in children, are often neglected. We have bacteria growing and spreading in our hospitals that do not respond to our antibiotic supply. These are the health challenges facing us in the 21st century. Fortunately, the United States has no equal in the biomedical sciences. This is due in large part to our nation's premier biomedical research investment the--NIH, which receives $28 billion per year after a doubling of their budget of $14 billion from 1998 to 2003. The NIH is comprised of 27 major institutes and centers, leading the way for the world in cancer, cardiovascular, infectious disease and allergy advancements for health promotion and relief from the burdens of disease. US biomedical advances are also due to our dynamic biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors. In our search for answers to our pressing health problems, the NIH has grown in the number of Institutes and Centers and in funding. At the same time, Congress and others have wanted to ensure that we are building on NIH's strengths to respond to complex health problems requiring interdisciplinary and collaborative work. Therefore, Congress commissioned the 2003 National Academy of Sciences report, ``Enhancing the Vitality of the National Institutes of Health: Organizational Change to Meet New Challenges'', that examined whether and how we could optimize the NIH's organizational structure to meet our next set of health challenges. The report stated that ``no organization as important as NIH should remain frozen in organization space''. At the same time, the report cautioned that any changes in organizational structure to achieve greater progress in chronic and emerging diseases were not without some difficulty and risk. The NAS report made a number of recommendations and our CURES legislation addresses the six major points. First, CURES seeks to strengthen the clinical research process by streamlining the clinical trials process by creating Centralized Internal Review Boards (CIRB). CIRB's would focus on simplifying the human subjects review processes for multi-institutional clinical trials. CURES also significantly augments current NIH investments to train the clinical research workforce of the future, and provides additional funding for multidisciplinary teams of researchers examining issues of quality and design of clinical trials. We need to continue to bring safe and effective diagnostics and therapeutics, but more efficiently. Secondly, our proposal enhances and increases trans-NIH strategic planning and funding. Currently, the NIH's 27 Centers and Institutes each have their own directors and budgets and thus, operate independently. The resulting structural and organizational stovepipes are limited in their ability to capitalize on the NIH's collective research capacity to address complex problems using the expertise of multiple fields. For example, the problem of diabetic retinopathy could be tackled by researchers in the Institutes of the Eye, Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney disease, Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, and Allergy Immunology and Infectious disease. However, there are few mechanisms for such trans-Institute initiatives that could lead to a cure or treatment. To address this problem, CURES has created multiple funding mechanisms for trans-Institute research and cross-fertilization of ideas. Strategic planning and prioritizing disease research is also integral to achieving progress more quickly. Therefore, the American Center for CURES Act would establish a CURES council, comprised of key health stakeholders to produce a translational research agenda for the Center based on research breakthroughs and areas of health need. Thirdly, the American Center for CURES Act of 2005 strengthens the Office of the NIH Director. Our legislation emphasizes the need for greater budgetary support and flexibility in the area of translational research. This follows much of the NIH Director's current efforts with the NIH Roadmap. Our legislation further supports the spirit of the NIH Roadmap with organizational and funding commitments that bring translational research investment to a necessary and appropriate scale, which has not been the case to date. The NIH Director, with the CURES Advisory Council, would play a key role in these efforts by recommending appointees for the Director of the American Center for CURES to the President. The NIH Director will also be a co-chair of the Center's Council and have a leading role in setting the research and funding priorities for translational research projects at the NIH. The NIH Director will also head other initiatives outlined in the legislation, such as launching a publicly accessible electronic database for all published NIH funded research. Fourth, our legislation creates a Director's Special Projects Program, called the Health Advanced Research Projects Agency (HARPA). The NAS committee recommended the creation of a program to support high-risk, high-potential payoff research. The Department of Defense has had significant success with its Defense Advanced Research Program Agency (DARPA), where a group of expert portfolio managers invest in and oversee innovative, multidisciplinary, collaborative projects to advance specific fields or to develop needed technologies. DARPA has lead to the creation of stealth technology, satellite surveillance, lasers, internet, and e-mail. Based on this model, HARPA would be housed within the Center and would help lead breakthrough advances using a translational ``challenge model'' in biomedical research. Breakthroughs could include a vaccine or other treatment against HIV or genetic probes pivotal to the elucidation of disease producing genes. HARPA would also be the key funding mechanism for trans-Institute research to prioritize and foster collaborative and trans-Institute research initiatives. Fifth, the NAS report recommended that the NIH intramural research program be more unique, innovative, and risk-taking. In response, CURES creates an Office of Intramural Risk Mapping, within the Office of Technology Transfer, which will oversee NIH's intramural research programs to help assure they are complementary to extramural and private sector research. The Office will also ensure that intramural research is also innovative and risk-taking to produce more novel and promising biomedical breakthroughs. The office will also make funds available to trans-Institute and center initiatives that focus on health risk analysis and corresponding scientific risk opportunity. Sixth, our legislation addresses the NAS report recommendation to standardize data and information management systems. The report was clear that the NIH must increase its capacity for data gathering and reporting to meet its obligations ``. . . for effective management, accountability, and transparency.'' Cures seek to improve the sharing of information by providing funding to the National Library of Medicine to create and maintain a publicly accessible database of all publications resulting from NIH-funded research and by establishing a national electronic registry and results database to increase enrollment in public and private clinical trials and to share efficacy and safety outcomes emanating from NIH-funded clinical research endeavors. Cures focuses on the need to expand the NLM facilities according to the demands of new scientific discoveries and fields, especially within the areas of genomics and proteinomics. In addition to the NAS report recommendations, other changes in the biomedical research landscape demand more targeted investments in promising and novel treatments. Our current response to research on important health problems is arguably dichotomous. We invest public money into the NIH or we hope the private market will produce essential drugs and tools. However, there needs to be greater collaboration between the private and public sectors. Private sector investment in biomedical research has grown to approximately $46 billion per year-- far more than our public sector investment in NIH. For new and effective therapies to become available, we need to build better public and private partnerships. Cures includes key provisions to accomplish this. Cures promotes the innovative efforts of small to medium sized biotechnology and bioengineering firms who require additional support in key traditionally under-funded stages of product development--the so called R&D ``Valley of Death.'' It expands the NIH's current small business support and rapid access to interventional development programs to move basic science through the product development pipeline faster. These programs would facilitate NIH partnerships with private industry in the preclinical stage of the R&D process so as to formulate a plan for health research translation and commercialization from the outset. Additionally, our legislation would move the NIH's Office of Technology Transfer into the American Center for Cures, where it would survey research being conducted in the private and public sectors to avoid duplication, target promising research investments, and broker more flexible and productive agreements for licensing and patents between the public and private sectors. The HARPA entity within the center is also designed to promote public-private joint R&D efforts. Today, we are proposing the establishment of the American Center for Cures, whose mission would be to promote more rapid translation of public and private research into therapies, diagnostics and tools, which can effectively treat and possibly cure diseases of critical importance to domestic and global health. With more targeted investment in translating our basic science research into diagnostics and therapeutics, we hope to bring more tangible health benefits to Americans and people all over the world. I ask unanimous consent that explanatory materials on the legislation including, ``Short Summary of the American Center for CURES Act of 2005,'' ``Explanation of How the American Center for CURES Act of 2005 Addresses the Findings of the 2003 National Academy of Sciences Report: `Enhancing the Vitality of the National Institutes of Health: Organizational Change to Meet New Challenges','' ``Section by Section Summary of the American Center for CURES Act of 2005,'' the full text of the legislation, and ``Quotes in Support of the American Center for CURES Act of 2005'' be printed in the Record.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, today, Senator Cochran, Senator Carper, Senator Hutchison, and I are introducing the American Center for CURES Act of 2005, which would establish the American Center for Cures, within the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The purpose of the Center would be to bring promising and novel diagnostics, therapies, drugs, and tools to treat disease faster to the public. We continue to face significant health challenges. In the US today, chronic diseases account for 7 out of 10 deaths, with the major killers being heart attack, cancer and stroke. Seventy percent of the $1.7 trillion dollars we spend on healthcare each year goes to chronic disease care. Around the world, HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria kill 4, 3, and 2 million people a year. On the horizon are emerging manmade and natural threats such as SARS, flu and bioterrorism. There are other diseases that we need better treatments and cures for, but that we do not devote enough attention to. Diseases of social stigma, such as depression, which is the most frequent reason people visit their physician, and seizure disorder, which is the primary neurological disorder in children, are often neglected. We have bacteria growing and spreading in our hospitals that do not respond to our antibiotic supply. These are the health challenges facing us in the 21st century. Fortunately, the United States has no equal in the biomedical sciences. This is due in large part to our nation's premier biomedical research investment the--NIH, which receives $28 billion per year after a doubling of their budget of $14 billion from 1998 to 2003. The NIH is comprised of 27 major institutes and centers, leading the way for the world in cancer, cardiovascular, infectious disease and allergy advancements for health promotion and relief from the burdens of disease. US biomedical advances are also due to our dynamic biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors. In our search for answers to our pressing health problems, the NIH has grown in the number of Institutes and Centers and in funding. At the same time, Congress and others have wanted to ensure that we are building on NIH's strengths to respond to complex health problems requiring interdisciplinary and collaborative work. Therefore, Congress commissioned the 2003 National Academy of Sciences report, ``Enhancing the Vitality of the National Institutes of Health: Organizational Change to Meet New Challenges'', that examined whether and how we could optimize the NIH's organizational structure to meet our next set of health challenges. The report stated that ``no organization as important as NIH should remain frozen in organization space''. At the same time, the report cautioned that any changes in organizational structure to achieve greater progress in chronic and emerging diseases were not without some difficulty and risk. The NAS report made a number of recommendations and our CURES legislation addresses the six major points. First, CURES seeks to strengthen the clinical research process by streamlining the clinical trials process by creating Centralized Internal Review Boards (CIRB). CIRB's would focus on simplifying the human subjects review processes for multi-institutional clinical trials. CURES also significantly augments current NIH investments to train the clinical research workforce of the future, and provides additional funding for multidisciplinary teams of researchers examining issues of quality and design of clinical trials. We need to continue to bring safe and effective diagnostics and therapeutics, but more efficiently. Secondly, our proposal enhances and increases trans-NIH strategic planning and funding. Currently, the NIH's 27 Centers and Institutes each have their own directors and budgets and thus, operate independently. The resulting structural and organizational stovepipes are limited in their ability to capitalize on the NIH's collective research capacity to address complex problems using the expertise of multiple fields. For example, the problem of diabetic retinopathy could be tackled by researchers in the Institutes of the Eye, Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney disease, Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, and Allergy Immunology and Infectious disease. However, there are few mechanisms for such trans-Institute initiatives that could lead to a cure or treatment. To address this problem, CURES has created multiple funding mechanisms for trans-Institute research and cross-fertilization of ideas. Strategic planning and prioritizing disease research is also integral to achieving progress more quickly. Therefore, the American Center for CURES Act would establish a CURES council, comprised of key health stakeholders to produce a translational research agenda for the Center based on research breakthroughs and areas of health need. Thirdly, the American Center for CURES Act of 2005 strengthens the Office of the NIH Director. Our legislation emphasizes the need for greater budgetary support and flexibility in the area of translational research. This follows much of the NIH Director's current efforts with the NIH Roadmap. Our legislation further supports the spirit of the NIH Roadmap with organizational and funding commitments that bring translational research investment to a necessary and appropriate scale, which has not been the case to date. The NIH Director, with the CURES Advisory Council, would play a key role in these efforts by recommending appointees for the Director of the American Center for CURES to the President. The NIH Director will also be a co-chair of the Center's Council and have a leading role in setting the research and funding priorities for translational research projects at the NIH. The NIH Director will also head other initiatives outlined in the legislation, such as launching a publicly accessible electronic database for all published NIH funded research. Fourth, our legislation creates a Director's Special Projects Program, called the Health Advanced Research Projects Agency (HARPA). The NAS committee recommended the creation of a program to support high-risk, high-potential payoff research. The Department of Defense has had significant success with its Defense Advanced Research Program Agency (DARPA), where a group of expert portfolio managers invest in and oversee innovative, multidisciplinary, collaborative projects to advance specific fields or to develop needed technologies. DARPA has lead to the creation of stealth technology, satellite surveillance, lasers, internet, and e-mail. Based on this model, HARPA would be housed within the Center and would help lead breakthrough advances using a translational ``challenge model'' in biomedical research. Breakthroughs could include a vaccine or other treatment against HIV or genetic probes pivotal to the elucidation of disease producing genes. HARPA would also be the key funding mechanism for trans-Institute research to prioritize and foster collaborative and trans-Institute research initiatives. Fifth, the NAS report recommended that the NIH intramural research program be more unique, innovative, and risk-taking. In response, CURES creates an Office of Intramural Risk Mapping, within the Office of Technology Transfer, which will oversee NIH's intramural research programs to help assure they are complementary to extramural and private sector research. The Office will also ensure that intramural research is also innovative and risk-taking to produce more novel and promising biomedical breakthroughs. The office will also make funds available to trans-Institute and center initiatives that focus on health risk analysis and corresponding scientific risk opportunity. Sixth, our legislation addresses the NAS report recommendation to standardize data and information management systems. The report was clear that the NIH must increase its capacity for data gathering and reporting to meet its obligations ``. . . for effective management, accountability, and transparency.'' Cures seek to improve the sharing of information by providing funding to the National Library of Medicine to create and maintain a publicly accessible database of all publications resulting from NIH-funded research and by establishing a national electronic registry and results database to increase enrollment in public and private clinical trials and to share efficacy and safety outcomes emanating from NIH-funded clinical research endeavors. Cures focuses on the need to expand the NLM facilities according to the demands of new scientific discoveries and fields, especially within the areas of genomics and proteinomics. In addition to the NAS report recommendations, other changes in the biomedical research landscape demand more targeted investments in promising and novel treatments. Our current response to research on important health problems is arguably dichotomous. We invest public money into the NIH or we hope the private market will produce essential drugs and tools. However, there needs to be greater collaboration between the private and public sectors. Private sector investment in biomedical research has grown to approximately $46 billion per year-- far more than our public sector investment in NIH. For new and effective therapies to become available, we need to build better public and private partnerships. Cures includes key provisions to accomplish this. Cures promotes the innovative efforts of small to medium sized biotechnology and bioengineering firms who require additional support in key traditionally under-funded stages of product development--the so called R&D ``Valley of Death.'' It expands the NIH's current small business support and rapid access to interventional development programs to move basic science through the product development pipeline faster. These programs would facilitate NIH partnerships with private industry in the preclinical stage of the R&D process so as to formulate a plan for health research translation and commercialization from the outset. Additionally, our legislation would move the NIH's Office of Technology Transfer into the American Center for Cures, where it would survey research being conducted in the private and public sectors to avoid duplication, target promising research investments, and broker more flexible and productive agreements for licensing and patents between the public and private sectors. The HARPA entity within the center is also designed to promote public-private joint R&D efforts. Today, we are proposing the establishment of the American Center for Cures, whose mission would be to promote more rapid translation of public and private research into therapies, diagnostics and tools, which can effectively treat and possibly cure diseases of critical importance to domestic and global health. With more targeted investment in translating our basic science research into diagnostics and therapeutics, we hope to bring more tangible health benefits to Americans and people all over the world. I ask unanimous consent that explanatory materials on the legislation including, ``Short Summary of the American Center for CURES Act of 2005,'' ``Explanation of How the American Center for CURES Act of 2005 Addresses the Findings of the 2003 National Academy of Sciences Report: `Enhancing the Vitality of the National Institutes of Health: Organizational Change to Meet New Challenges','' ``Section by Section Summary of the American Center for CURES Act of 2005,'' the full text of the legislation, and ``Quotes in Support of the American Center for CURES Act of 2005'' be printed in the Record.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, our dependence on foreign oil is sapping America's power and independence as a nation. It is urgent we begin now to diversify the fuels we use to power our vehicles or risk ceding our national power to the rulers of faraway deserts, distant tundras, steaming rain forests or off-shore, drilling platforms half a world away. I rise today as part of a bipartisan group of 10 Senators who represent the American Northeast, South, Midwest and West to introduce the Vehicle and Fuel Choices for America Security Act. We chose this title because nothing less than our national security is at stake. Besides myself, the rest of the ``Gang of Ten,'' or the ``Energy Security Ten,'' as some call us are Senators Sam Brownback of Kansas, Evan Bayh of Indiana, Norm Coleman of Minnesota, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Ken Salazar of Colorado, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Bill Nelson of Florida, Richard Lugar of Indiana and Barack Obama of Illinois. And we expect even more of our colleagues from both sides of the aisle will be joining us soon. I hope that in the future we all look back on the day this bill was introduced as the beginning of a major shift in our national security strategy. I hope that history will say we saw a challenge to our national security and prosperity and then met it and mastered it. A recent report by the International Energy Agency, IEA, sums up the urgent need for our legislation. According to the IEA, global demand for oil--now about 85 million barrels a day--will increase by more than 50 percent to 130 million barrels a day between now and 2030 if nothing is done. The industrialized world's dependence on oil heightens global instability. The authors of the IEA report note that the way things are going ``we are ending up with 95 percent of the world relying for its economic well-being on decisions made by five or six countries in the Middle East.'' Besides the Mideast, I would add that Nigeria is roiled by instability, Venezuela's current leadership is hostile to us and Russia's resurgent state power has ominous overtones. In fact, we are just one well-orchestrated terrorist attack or political upheaval away from a $100-a-barrel overnight price spike that would that would send the global economy tumbling and the industrialized world, including China and India, scrambling to secure supplies from the remaining and limited number of oil supply sites. History tells us that wars have started over such competition. Left unchecked, I fear that we are literally watching the slow but steady erosion of America's power and independence as a nation--our economic and military power and our political independence. We are burning it up in our automobile engines and spewing it from our tailpipes because of our absolute dependence on oil to fuel our cars and trucks. That dependence on oil--and that means foreign oil because our own reserves are less than 1 percent of the world's oil reserves--puts us in jeopardy in three key ways--a convergence forming a perfect storm that is extremely dangerous to America's national security and economy. First, the structure of the global oil market deeply affects--and distorts--our foreign policy. Our broader interests and aspirations must compete with our own need for oil and the growing thirst for it in the rest of the world--especially by China and India. As a study in the journal Foreign Affairs makes clear, China is moving aggressively to compete for the world's limited supplies of oil not just with its growing economic power, but with its growing military and diplomatic power as well. Second, today we must depend for our oil on a global gallery of nations that are politically unstable, unreliable, or just plain hostile to us. All that and much more should make us worry because if we don't change--it is within their borders and under their earth and waters that our economic and national security lies. Doing nothing about our oil dependency will make us a pitiful giant-- like Gulliver in Lilliput--tied down by smaller nations and subject to their whims. And we will have given them the ropes and helped them tie the knots. We can take on this problem now and stand tall as the free and independent giant we are by moving our nation--and the world--on to energy independence, by setting America free from its dependence on oil. There is only one way to do this. We need to transform our total transportation infrastructure from the refinery to the tailpipe and each step in between because transportation is the key to energy independence. Barely 2 percent of our electricity comes from oil. Ninety six percent of the energy used to power our cars comes from oil--literally millions of barrels of oil per day. This is unsustainable and dangerous. The Vehicle and Fuel Choices for America Security Act aims to strengthen America's security by transforming transportation from the refinery to the tailpipe and each step in between, thus breaking our dependence on foreign oil. We start by making it our national policy to cut consumption by 10 million barrels a day over the next 25 years. First, we need to rethink and then remake our fuel supplies. Gasoline is not the only portable source of stored energy. Tons of agricultural waste and millions of acres of idle grassland can be used to create billions of barrels of new fuels. Our farmers could soon be measuring production in barrels of energy as well as bushels of food. Then we must remake our automobile engines as well. Vehicles that get 500 miles per gallon--or that use no refined crude oil--are within our grasp. I know that sounds unbelievable. I am going to tell you how we can do it. To help us get there, our bill also requires that by 2012, 10 percent of all vehicles sold in the U.S. be hybrid, hybrid-electric plug-in or alternative fuel vehicles. That number will rise by 10 percent a year until it reaches 50 percent in 2016. To help spur this market along, our bill amends our current energy policy to require that one quarter of federal vehicles purchased must be hybrids or plug-in hybrids. My bill will detail how we can get there with available technology and previously unavailable Federal Government leadership. Coupling these new programs with the explicit oil-savings goals for the Federal Government is the key to the effectiveness of this proposal. I can almost hear colleagues murmur, So, Senator Lieberman, what else is new? We've been hearing this for years and nothing has happened. I can't blame you if you are skeptical. The struggle for oil independence has been going on at least since Jimmy Carter was President. But things have changed since the days of Jimmy Carter and even since last summer. There is a new understanding of the depth of the crisis that our oil dependence is creating. This summer's doubling of gasoline and crude oil prices hit tens of millions of Americans with the global reality of oil demand and pricing. And Hurricane Katrina reminded us how vulnerable our supplies can become. This reality is bipartisan. And, along with my colleagues cosponsoring this bill, I think Americans are ready to set the serious goals that eluded us in the past and take the bold steps necessary to reach those goals. Now let me give you more details. The bill I will propose puts our Nation's transportation system on a new road--a road where the tanks are filled with more home-grown fuel-- and I do mean grown--not just American corn, but from American sugar, prairie grass, and agricultural waste. We will push harder for more and quicker production and commercialization of biomass-based fuels. The Energy bill signed into law last summer created a new set of incentives for these fuel alternatives, including their commercial production. What my bill would do--again, by including a mass-production mandate for alternative fuel vehicles--is ensure that the investments would be made in the facilities to produce and market these new fuels by providing big demand for them. The bill would also create a program to guarantee that filling stations had the pumps to provide the fuel to keep pace with the growing alternative-fuel fleet produced by the mandate. Is there a model to give us confidence we can achieve this transformation? Yes. Brazil is now enjoying substantial immunity from current high world oil prices, thanks to a long-term strategy, launched during the oil shocks of the 1970s, to integrate sugar cane ethanol into its fuel supply. They started initially with a mandate that all fuel sold in the country contain 25 percent alcohol. They are now up to 40 percent biofuels. In addition to the fuel mandate, Brazil offered low-interest loans and tax breaks for the building of distilleries and subsidized a fuel distribution network. Brazil has the advantage of a substantial sugar cane industry already in place. But we have our own vast potential to develop our own biofuel supply, using feedstock like corn, crop waste, switch grass, sugarcane and fast-growing trees and shrubs such as hybrid poplars and willows. According to the Department of Energy, if two-thirds of the Nation's idled cropland were used to grow these kinds of energy crops, the result could be dramatic. Those 35 million acres could produce between 15 and 35 billion gallons of ethanol each year to fuel cars, trucks, and buses. That is about 2.2 million barrels of fuel a day from right here in the U.S.A. What Brazil offers us, more importantly, is a case study of government leadership to combine technology mandates and subsidies to wean its transportation sector from foreign oil to a domestic alternative. From this January through this July--before this summer's fuel spike--we have sent almost $100 billion out of the country to purchase oil, while the Brazilians are now relying on home-grown fuel. The key to their success is that they responded 30 years ago to the first storm warnings. We did not, and now the storm is at our shores, slapping against the levees of our economic strength and national security. We have to mobilize and lead a similar response as Brazil did. If we do this right, our farmers could soon be measuring production in barrels of energy as well as bushels of food. Our energy would be guaranteed ``Made in America'' and the profits would be guaranteed ``Kept in America.'' For all these new fuels to be effective, we need the flexible fuel vehicles that can take advantage of them. As I said earlier, our bill also requires that 50 percent of all vehicles sold in the U.S. be hybrid, hybrid-electric plug-in, or alternative fuel vehicles by 2016. Sound ambitious? It is not. It has already happened in Brazil. Several automakers selling cars in Brazil, including our own General Motors and Ford, already manufacture a fleet that is more than 50- percent flexible fuel cars that can run on any combination of gasoline and biofuels. The technology exists now and adds a negligible cost--about $150--to the price of each vehicle. For this we get the flexibility to power a car with fuel made from corn, prairie grass, or agricultural waste from our own heartland that will cost a lot less than gasoline does today. Maximizing fuel efficiency and promoting energy independence even further would be a new generation of flexible-fuel hybrid cars known as plug-ins because you can plug them in at night to recharge the battery. Hybrids that use a use both a gasoline engine and electric motor for power are already getting 50 miles per gallon. Making them flexible fuel cars, as I've already said, can save us more than 2 million barrels of gasoline a day. But we can do even better--dramatically better--with the plug-in hybrid that is just now on the threshold of commercialization. Like the present hybrids, it would use both a gasoline and electric motor. But the plug-in hybrid would be able to use the battery exclusively for the first 30 miles of a trip. Think of that for a minute. Although Americans drive about 2.2 trillion miles a year, according the Census, the vast majority of those trips are less than 15 miles. That means a plug-in hybrid would use zero--zero--gallons of gas or any combustible fuel for the vast majority of its trips. And experts tell me it could effectively get the 500 miles per gallon on longer trips. Plugging in your car during off peak hours--when power is in surplus and cheaper--would soon just become part of the modem daily routine, like plugging in your cell phone or PDA before you go to bed. And off-peak electricity can be the equivalent of 50 cent a gallon gasoline, I repeat--the equivalent of 50 cent a gallon fuel is feasible. Of course, electricity does not come magically through the wires to our homes. That power would come from coal, natural gas, nuclear, solar, wind or other sources--sources that we have in abundance here at home--and a little--very little--would come from oil. This isn't pie in the sky. These vehicles could be in your garage within a couple of years. Some of the incentives for achieving this were included in the Energy bill signed into law in August. But they did not go nearly far enough. We need to couple these incentives with real performance standards and sales requirements to ensure that as soon as possible new cars are running not just on gasoline but on biofuels and electricity. As always, there is a do-nothing crowd that says the ever-rising price of gasoline and crude oil are the cure--that with higher prices people will reduce consumption and the market will respond with greater investments in the supply of oil to bring prices down. But all that would do is perpetuate the problem. Market-driven oil- dependency is still dependency on foreign oil, driving us further down the current path toward national insecurity and economic and environmental troubles. Some say that we can ease the crisis through greater domestic drilling--in places like the Arctic Refuge and other public lands or off our shores. But that won't make a dent in the problem. In the world of oil, geology is destiny and the U.S. today has only 1 percent of the world's oil reserves. And that small new supply wouldn't matter much in the global market, since the price of oil produced within the United States rises and falls with the global market, regardless of where it is produced. We just don't have enough oil in the U.S. anymore. And no matter how much more we drill, we will still be paying the world price of oil--not an American price. Our present energy and transportation systems were born at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries with the twin discoveries of oil extraction and the internal combustion engine. Those systems have served us well bringing growth to our Nation and the world. But it is now the 21st century, and it is time to move on. The era of big oil is over. It is time to revolutionize our entire energy infrastructure, from the refinery to the tailpipe, and begin a new era of energy independence. It is time to set America free by cutting our dependence on foreign oil and by doing so strengthen our security, preserve our independence and energize our economy.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise to express my support for S. 1783, the Pension Security and Transparency Act. This bill will make much needed reforms to our pension security system. It takes important steps to address the deteriorating financial condition of the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, PBGC, to ultimately protect the defined benefit plans of millions of American workers. My purpose in coming to the floor today is to make note of a number of provisions in this bill that I believe are particularly important to our system of retirement security, and I am pleased that this bill incorporates these provisions. First, the bill includes measures to encourage companies to implement so-called auto-enroll 401(k) plans. In plain English, this will accomplish a relatively simple, but tremendously effective change to ensure that more Americans are saving for their retirement. Currently, under most retirement plans, employees must take affirmative steps to join a company's 401(k) plan. Under an automatic enrollment system, new employees would automatically be included in an employer's 401(k) plan, and would have to take affirmative steps to withdraw from the plan. In essence, the choice of whether to participate in a retirement plan is still entirely with the worker, however, the default would be participation in the plan: workers could ``opt out'', rather than having to ``opt in'' to be covered. Many studies have indicated that automatic enrollment is remarkably effective in raising participation rates among eligible workers, particularly for lower income workers. One study, for example, found that automatic enrollment increased participation from 13 percent to 80 percent for workers making under $20,000 a year. The fact is that without automatic enrollment, many workers don't take advantage of the savings opportunities available through 401(k)s. Sometimes it is because of inertia, or because of the more immediate demands of work and family, or because the options appear intimidating and confusing. The automatic 401(k) is a relatively simple concept that has the power to enhance retirement savings for millions of American workers. Earlier this year, I joined Senator Bingaman in introducing S. 875, the Save More for Retirement Act, to encourage such auto-enrollment plans. Our bill also included provisions to encourage plans to add a feature whereby employees' contributions would automatically increase each year until certain thresholds were met. We sought to address the concern that many who do participate in company plans don't take full advantage of the savings opportunities and therefore may be ill-prepared for retirement. I am pleased that the bill before us includes both the automatic enrollment and automatic increase provisions. I am also pleased that the bill includes a number of provisions often referred to as the ``post-Enron'' measures. We on the Governmental Affairs Committee heard devastating testimony of how thousands of Enron workers saw their retirements savings plummet over the course of weeks. The bill today seeks to address these concerns by ensuring that workers do not have all their eggs in one basket. It encourages diversification of pension investments from employer stock. It also calls for workers and retirees to get regular statements showing the market value of pension investments. In addition, it encourages employers to provide workers with access to unbiased investment advice as to how to invest their pension retirement accounts. There are many much needed reforms in this bill to ensure that defined benefit plans are adequately funded and that the PBGC remains solvent. It is not perfect, but it represents an effective compromise on a complex matter. I anticipate that additional modifications will be made in conference. I rise here today, however, to make note of these particular provisions that I believe will encourage and protect retirement savings for millions of Americans.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, our dependence on foreign oil is sapping America's power and independence as a nation. It is urgent we begin now to diversify the fuels we use to power our vehicles or risk ceding our national power to the rulers of faraway deserts, distant tundras, steaming rain forests or off-shore, drilling platforms half a world away. I rise today as part of a bipartisan group of 10 Senators who represent the American Northeast, South, Midwest and West to introduce the Vehicle and Fuel Choices for America Security Act. We chose this title because nothing less than our national security is at stake. Besides myself, the rest of the ``Gang of Ten,'' or the ``Energy Security Ten,'' as some call us are Senators Sam Brownback of Kansas, Evan Bayh of Indiana, Norm Coleman of Minnesota, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Ken Salazar of Colorado, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Bill Nelson of Florida, Richard Lugar of Indiana and Barack Obama of Illinois. And we expect even more of our colleagues from both sides of the aisle will be joining us soon. I hope that in the future we all look back on the day this bill was introduced as the beginning of a major shift in our national security strategy. I hope that history will say we saw a challenge to our national security and prosperity and then met it and mastered it. A recent report by the International Energy Agency, IEA, sums up the urgent need for our legislation. According to the IEA, global demand for oil--now about 85 million barrels a day--will increase by more than 50 percent to 130 million barrels a day between now and 2030 if nothing is done. The industrialized world's dependence on oil heightens global instability. The authors of the IEA report note that the way things are going ``we are ending up with 95 percent of the world relying for its economic well-being on decisions made by five or six countries in the Middle East.'' Besides the Mideast, I would add that Nigeria is roiled by instability, Venezuela's current leadership is hostile to us and Russia's resurgent state power has ominous overtones. In fact, we are just one well-orchestrated terrorist attack or political upheaval away from a $100-a-barrel overnight price spike that would that would send the global economy tumbling and the industrialized world, including China and India, scrambling to secure supplies from the remaining and limited number of oil supply sites. History tells us that wars have started over such competition. Left unchecked, I fear that we are literally watching the slow but steady erosion of America's power and independence as a nation--our economic and military power and our political independence. We are burning it up in our automobile engines and spewing it from our tailpipes because of our absolute dependence on oil to fuel our cars and trucks. That dependence on oil--and that means foreign oil because our own reserves are less than 1 percent of the world's oil reserves--puts us in jeopardy in three key ways--a convergence forming a perfect storm that is extremely dangerous to America's national security and economy. First, the structure of the global oil market deeply affects--and distorts--our foreign policy. Our broader interests and aspirations must compete with our own need for oil and the growing thirst for it in the rest of the world--especially by China and India. As a study in the journal Foreign Affairs makes clear, China is moving aggressively to compete for the world's limited supplies of oil not just with its growing economic power, but with its growing military and diplomatic power as well. Second, today we must depend for our oil on a global gallery of nations that are politically unstable, unreliable, or just plain hostile to us. All that and much more should make us worry because if we don't change--it is within their borders and under their earth and waters that our economic and national security lies. Doing nothing about our oil dependency will make us a pitiful giant-- like Gulliver in Lilliput--tied down by smaller nations and subject to their whims. And we will have given them the ropes and helped them tie the knots. We can take on this problem now and stand tall as the free and independent giant we are by moving our nation--and the world--on to energy independence, by setting America free from its dependence on oil. There is only one way to do this. We need to transform our total transportation infrastructure from the refinery to the tailpipe and each step in between because transportation is the key to energy independence. Barely 2 percent of our electricity comes from oil. Ninety six percent of the energy used to power our cars comes from oil--literally millions of barrels of oil per day. This is unsustainable and dangerous. The Vehicle and Fuel Choices for America Security Act aims to strengthen America's security by transforming transportation from the refinery to the tailpipe and each step in between, thus breaking our dependence on foreign oil. We start by making it our national policy to cut consumption by 10 million barrels a day over the next 25 years. First, we need to rethink and then remake our fuel supplies. Gasoline is not the only portable source of stored energy. Tons of agricultural waste and millions of acres of idle grassland can be used to create billions of barrels of new fuels. Our farmers could soon be measuring production in barrels of energy as well as bushels of food. Then we must remake our automobile engines as well. Vehicles that get 500 miles per gallon--or that use no refined crude oil--are within our grasp. I know that sounds unbelievable. I am going to tell you how we can do it. To help us get there, our bill also requires that by 2012, 10 percent of all vehicles sold in the U.S. be hybrid, hybrid-electric plug-in or alternative fuel vehicles. That number will rise by 10 percent a year until it reaches 50 percent in 2016. To help spur this market along, our bill amends our current energy policy to require that one quarter of federal vehicles purchased must be hybrids or plug-in hybrids. My bill will detail how we can get there with available technology and previously unavailable Federal Government leadership. Coupling these new programs with the explicit oil-savings goals for the Federal Government is the key to the effectiveness of this proposal. I can almost hear colleagues murmur, So, Senator Lieberman, what else is new? We've been hearing this for years and nothing has happened. I can't blame you if you are skeptical. The struggle for oil independence has been going on at least since Jimmy Carter was President. But things have changed since the days of Jimmy Carter and even since last summer. There is a new understanding of the depth of the crisis that our oil dependence is creating. This summer's doubling of gasoline and crude oil prices hit tens of millions of Americans with the global reality of oil demand and pricing. And Hurricane Katrina reminded us how vulnerable our supplies can become. This reality is bipartisan. And, along with my colleagues cosponsoring this bill, I think Americans are ready to set the serious goals that eluded us in the past and take the bold steps necessary to reach those goals. Now let me give you more details. The bill I will propose puts our Nation's transportation system on a new road--a road where the tanks are filled with more home-grown fuel-- and I do mean grown--not just American corn, but from American sugar, prairie grass, and agricultural waste. We will push harder for more and quicker production and commercialization of biomass-based fuels. The Energy bill signed into law last summer created a new set of incentives for these fuel alternatives, including their commercial production. What my bill would do--again, by including a mass-production mandate for alternative fuel vehicles--is ensure that the investments would be made in the facilities to produce and market these new fuels by providing big demand for them. The bill would also create a program to guarantee that filling stations had the pumps to provide the fuel to keep pace with the growing alternative-fuel fleet produced by the mandate. Is there a model to give us confidence we can achieve this transformation? Yes. Brazil is now enjoying substantial immunity from current high world oil prices, thanks to a long-term strategy, launched during the oil shocks of the 1970s, to integrate sugar cane ethanol into its fuel supply. They started initially with a mandate that all fuel sold in the country contain 25 percent alcohol. They are now up to 40 percent biofuels. In addition to the fuel mandate, Brazil offered low-interest loans and tax breaks for the building of distilleries and subsidized a fuel distribution network. Brazil has the advantage of a substantial sugar cane industry already in place. But we have our own vast potential to develop our own biofuel supply, using feedstock like corn, crop waste, switch grass, sugarcane and fast-growing trees and shrubs such as hybrid poplars and willows. According to the Department of Energy, if two-thirds of the Nation's idled cropland were used to grow these kinds of energy crops, the result could be dramatic. Those 35 million acres could produce between 15 and 35 billion gallons of ethanol each year to fuel cars, trucks, and buses. That is about 2.2 million barrels of fuel a day from right here in the U.S.A. What Brazil offers us, more importantly, is a case study of government leadership to combine technology mandates and subsidies to wean its transportation sector from foreign oil to a domestic alternative. From this January through this July--before this summer's fuel spike--we have sent almost $100 billion out of the country to purchase oil, while the Brazilians are now relying on home-grown fuel. The key to their success is that they responded 30 years ago to the first storm warnings. We did not, and now the storm is at our shores, slapping against the levees of our economic strength and national security. We have to mobilize and lead a similar response as Brazil did. If we do this right, our farmers could soon be measuring production in barrels of energy as well as bushels of food. Our energy would be guaranteed ``Made in America'' and the profits would be guaranteed ``Kept in America.'' For all these new fuels to be effective, we need the flexible fuel vehicles that can take advantage of them. As I said earlier, our bill also requires that 50 percent of all vehicles sold in the U.S. be hybrid, hybrid-electric plug-in, or alternative fuel vehicles by 2016. Sound ambitious? It is not. It has already happened in Brazil. Several automakers selling cars in Brazil, including our own General Motors and Ford, already manufacture a fleet that is more than 50- percent flexible fuel cars that can run on any combination of gasoline and biofuels. The technology exists now and adds a negligible cost--about $150--to the price of each vehicle. For this we get the flexibility to power a car with fuel made from corn, prairie grass, or agricultural waste from our own heartland that will cost a lot less than gasoline does today. Maximizing fuel efficiency and promoting energy independence even further would be a new generation of flexible-fuel hybrid cars known as plug-ins because you can plug them in at night to recharge the battery. Hybrids that use a use both a gasoline engine and electric motor for power are already getting 50 miles per gallon. Making them flexible fuel cars, as I've already said, can save us more than 2 million barrels of gasoline a day. But we can do even better--dramatically better--with the plug-in hybrid that is just now on the threshold of commercialization. Like the present hybrids, it would use both a gasoline and electric motor. But the plug-in hybrid would be able to use the battery exclusively for the first 30 miles of a trip. Think of that for a minute. Although Americans drive about 2.2 trillion miles a year, according the Census, the vast majority of those trips are less than 15 miles. That means a plug-in hybrid would use zero--zero--gallons of gas or any combustible fuel for the vast majority of its trips. And experts tell me it could effectively get the 500 miles per gallon on longer trips. Plugging in your car during off peak hours--when power is in surplus and cheaper--would soon just become part of the modem daily routine, like plugging in your cell phone or PDA before you go to bed. And off-peak electricity can be the equivalent of 50 cent a gallon gasoline, I repeat--the equivalent of 50 cent a gallon fuel is feasible. Of course, electricity does not come magically through the wires to our homes. That power would come from coal, natural gas, nuclear, solar, wind or other sources--sources that we have in abundance here at home--and a little--very little--would come from oil. This isn't pie in the sky. These vehicles could be in your garage within a couple of years. Some of the incentives for achieving this were included in the Energy bill signed into law in August. But they did not go nearly far enough. We need to couple these incentives with real performance standards and sales requirements to ensure that as soon as possible new cars are running not just on gasoline but on biofuels and electricity. As always, there is a do-nothing crowd that says the ever-rising price of gasoline and crude oil are the cure--that with higher prices people will reduce consumption and the market will respond with greater investments in the supply of oil to bring prices down. But all that would do is perpetuate the problem. Market-driven oil- dependency is still dependency on foreign oil, driving us further down the current path toward national insecurity and economic and environmental troubles. Some say that we can ease the crisis through greater domestic drilling--in places like the Arctic Refuge and other public lands or off our shores. But that won't make a dent in the problem. In the world of oil, geology is destiny and the U.S. today has only 1 percent of the world's oil reserves. And that small new supply wouldn't matter much in the global market, since the price of oil produced within the United States rises and falls with the global market, regardless of where it is produced. We just don't have enough oil in the U.S. anymore. And no matter how much more we drill, we will still be paying the world price of oil--not an American price. Our present energy and transportation systems were born at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries with the twin discoveries of oil extraction and the internal combustion engine. Those systems have served us well bringing growth to our Nation and the world. But it is now the 21st century, and it is time to move on. The era of big oil is over. It is time to revolutionize our entire energy infrastructure, from the refinery to the tailpipe, and begin a new era of energy independence. It is time to set America free by cutting our dependence on foreign oil and by doing so strengthen our security, preserve our independence and energize our economy.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Virginia. I rise to support the Warner amendment and to respectfully oppose the Levin amendment. I believe something very important has happened in the last 24 hours. In my opinion, the debate has grown in our country and in this city much too partisan over what is happening in Iraq. That partisanship has begun to get in the way of the potential for a successful completion of our mission there. I cite the great Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, who said: Politics must end at the water's edge. Why? So that America speaks with maximum authority against those who would divide and conquer us in the free world. That is from an earlier chapter in history, but his words cry out to us. Here is what the Washington Post said Saturday: President Bush and leading congressional Democrats lobbed angry charges at each other Friday in an increasingly personal battle over the origins of the Iraq war. The sharp tenor Friday resembled an election year campaign more than a policy disagreement. That is the danger that Vandenberg warns of. And about what? About prewar intelligence, almost 3 years ago--not irrelevant, not unimportant, but not as relevant and important as how we successfully complete our mission in Iraq, how we protect the 150,000 men and women fighting for us in uniform over there, how we do what the majority of Members of both parties have said is so important to us--successfully complete this mission. Senator Warner and Senator Levin have done something unique. Senator Levin worked very hard on our side to try to put together a broad amendment that could involve as many members of the Democratic caucus as possible. He did something that is important: expressed support for the troops, for successful completion of the mission, but quite correctly asked the administration and the Pentagon for a plan, for measurements, for the beginning of a more open and complete dialog with Congress. He put something in there that I don't agree with that will lead me respectfully to vote against the amendment. The last paragraph in the Levin-Reid amendment looks like a timetable for withdrawal. It may not be the intention, but I fear that is the message it will send. That is a message I fear will discourage our troops in the field, will encourage the terrorists, and will confuse the Iraqis. Senator Warner has come along and accepted most of the Levin amendment except primarily eliminated that last paragraph. In doing so, these two leaders, Senator Levin and Senator Warner, have created a context to break through the partisanship that has begun to diminish American public support for the war, and that means making it more difficult for our troops to successfully complete the mission. We set up a dialog between the Congress and the President, measuring points, and hopefully the administration will respond. This is a statement of trust between Senator Warner and Senator Levin. I hope it will be responded to by the administration because ultimately, only together, as Vandenberg advised, will we achieve success in Iraq. And success in Iraq means great stability in the Middle East, great freedom for the people of Iraq, and a setback for the terrorists who attacked us on September 11 and are anxious to do so again. I thank my friends for working together to get us to this point. Here is my hope. The vote on the Levin amendment, I gather, will be first. I will respectfully vote against it. If it does not pass, I hope there is overwhelming support for the Warner amendment. I can even dream that 100 Senators would vote for it. That would be the strongest statement of support to our troops and the strongest statement of opposition to our enemy in Iraq. I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, this is one of those quiet moments in the Senate with very few people in the Chamber when, in my opinion, something very important is happening. It is happening in good measure because of the two good men, my colleagues from Virginia and Michigan, who lead the Armed Services Committee, of which I am privileged to be a member. They are two gentlemen, two patriots, two people who have known each other for a long time, who work closely together, respect each other, even seem to like each other and, most important of all, trust each other. Those qualities of personal trust and personal relationship have been too absent from our Nation's consideration of the ongoing war in Iraq among our political leadership. We have, I am convinced, suffered from it. It is no surprise to my colleagues that I strongly supported the war in Iraq. I was privileged to be the Democratic cosponsor, with the Senator from Virginia, of the authorizing resolution which received overwhelming bipartisan support. As I look back on it and as I follow the debates about prewar intelligence, I have no regrets about having sponsored and supported that resolution because of all the other reasons we had in our national security interest to remove Saddam Hussein from power, a brutal, murdering dictator, an aggressive invader of his neighbors, a supporter of terrorism, a hater of the United States of America. He was for us a ticking timebomb that if we did not remove him I am convinced would have blown up, metaphorically speaking, in America's face. I am grateful to the American military for the extraordinary bravery and brilliance of their campaign to remove Saddam Hussein. I know we are safer as a nation, and to say the obvious that the Iraqi people are freer as a people, and the Middle East has a chance for a new day and stability with Saddam Hussein gone. We will come to another day to debate the past of prewar intelligence. But let me say briefly the questions raised in our time are important. The international intelligence community believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Probably most significant, and I guess historically puzzling, is that Saddam Hussein acted in a way to send a message that he had a program of weapons of mass destruction. He would not, in response to one of the 17 U.N. Security Council resolutions that he violated, declare he had eliminated the inventory of weapons of mass destruction that he reported to the U.N. after the end of the gulf war in 1991. I do not want to go off on that issue. I want to say that the debate about the war has become much too partisan in our time. And something is happening here tonight that I believe, I hope, I pray we will look back and say was a turning point and opened the road to Republican and Democratic cooperation, White House and congressional cooperation, to complete the mission. As Senator Levin said, no matter what anyone thinks about why we got into the war and whether we should have been in there, it is hard to find anybody around the Senate--I have not heard anybody--who does not want us to successfully complete our mission there. I feel that deeply. If we withdraw prematurely from Iraq, there will be civil war, and there is a great probability that others in the neighborhood will come in. The Iranians will be tempted to come in on the side of the Shia Muslims in the south. The Turks will be tempted to come in against the Kurds in the north. The other Sunni nations, such as the Saudis and the Jordanians, will be sorely tempted, if not to come in at least to aggressively support the Sunni Muslim population. There will be instability in the Middle East, and the hope of creating a different model for a better life in the Middle East in this historic center of the Arab world, Iraq, will be gone. If we successfully complete our mission, we will have left a country that is self-governing with an open economy, with an opportunity for the people of Iraq to do what they clearly want to do, which is to live a better life, to get a job, to have their kids get a decent education, to live a better life. There seems to be broad consensus on that, and yet the partisanship that characterizes our time here gets in the way of realizing those broadly expressed and shared goals. Politics must end at the water's edge. That is what Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan said, articulating the important ideal that we seem to have lost too often in our time. I found a fuller statement of Senator Vandenberg's position, the ideal. I found it to be in some ways more complicated and in other ways much more compelling. I want to read from it. Senator Vandenberg said: To me ``bipartisan foreign policy'' means a mutual effort, under our indispensable two-Party system, to unite our official voice at the water's edge so that America speaks with maximum authority against those who would divide and conquer us and the free world. If that doesn't speak to us today--the threat of Islamist terrorism, the desire they have to divide us and, in that sense, to conquer us in the free world. Senator Vandenberg continued in his definition of what he meant by bipartisanship in foreign policy: It does not involve the remotest surrender of free debate in determining our position. On the contrary, frank cooperation and free debate are indispensable to ultimate unity-- Of which I speak. In a word, it simply seeks national security ahead of partisan advantage. I felt again in recent days and recent months how far we have strayed down the partisan path from Vandenberg's ideals. The most recent disconcerting evidence of this was the lead story from the Washington Post--it was in papers all over the country--last Saturday, November 12. I read from that story: President Bush and leading congressional Democrats lobbed angry charges at each other Friday in an increasingly personal battle over the origins of the Iraq war. Although the two sides have long skirmished over the war, the sharp tenor Friday resembled an election year campaign more than a policy disagreement. That from Saturday's Washington Post. Campaign rhetoric over policy debate, and what about? About how we got into the war 2\1/2\ years ago, not about how we together can successfully complete our mission in Iraq. The questions raised about prewar intelligence are not irrelevant, they are not unimportant, but they are nowhere near as important and relevant as how we successfully complete our mission in Iraq and protect the 150,000 men and women in uniform who are fighting for us there. I go back to Vandenberg's phrase; the question is how Democrats and Republicans can ``unite our . . . voice at the water's edge . . . against those who would divide and conquer us and the free world'' in Iraq, I add, and beyond. The danger is that by spending so much attention on the past here, we contribute to a drop in public support among the American people for the war, and that is consequential. Terrorists know they cannot defeat us in Iraq, but they also know they can defeat us in America by breaking the will and steadfast support of the American people for this cause. There is a wonderful phrase from the Bible that I have quoted before: If the sound of the trumpet be uncertain, who will follow into battle? In our time, I am afraid that the trumpet has been replaced by public opinion polls, and if the public opinion polls are uncertain, if support for the war seems to be dropping, who will follow into battle and when will our brave and brilliant men and women in uniform in Iraq begin to wonder whether they have the support of the American people? When will that begin to affect their morale? I worry the partisanship of our time has begun to get in the way of the successful completion of our mission in Iraq. I urge my colleagues at every moment, when we do anything regarding this war, that we consider the ideal and we are confident within ourselves. Not that we are stifling free debate. Free debate, as Vandenberg said, is the necessary precondition to the unity we need to maximize our authority against those who would divide and conquer us. But the point is to make sure we feel in ourselves that the aim of our actions and our words is national security, not partisan advantage. Now we come to today. After reading that paper on Saturday, I took the original draft amendment submitted by Senator Warner and Senator Frist--it actually wasn't offered, but it was around--and Senator Levin and Senator Reid. I took the amendments back to Connecticut, and last night I looked them over. Neither one expressed fully what I hoped it would, but as I stepped back, I said that these two amendments--one Republican, one Democrat, unfortunate in a way breaking by parties-- these amendments are not that far apart. I like the way in which the Warner amendment recited again the findings that led us to war against Saddam Hussein and, quite explicitly, cited the progress that has been made. I do think Senator Levin's amendment doesn't quite do this part enough, about the progress, particularly among the political leaders of Iraq. They have done something remarkable in a country that lived for 30 years under a dictator who suppressed all political activity, encouraged the increasing division and bitterness among the Shia's, the Sunnis, the Kurds. These people, with our help and encouragement, have begun to negotiate like real political leaders in a democracy. It is not always pretty. What we do here is not always most attractive. That is democracy. Most important of all, 8 million Iraqis came out in the face of terrorist threats in January to vote on that interim legislation. Almost 10 million came out to vote on a constitution, which is a pretty good document, a historically good document in the context of the Arab world. What happened when the Sunnis felt they were not getting enough of what they wanted in a referendum? They didn't go to the street, most of them, with arms to start a civil war; they registered to vote. That is a miraculous achievement and a change in attitude and action. They came out to vote in great numbers, and they will come out, I predict, again in December in the elections and elect enough Sunnis to have an effect on the Constitution next year. So I wish that some of that had been stated in Senator Levin's amendment.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I would.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank my friend from Michigan. What I said, and I know the Senator from Michigan was involved in a conversation, I was actually going back and quoting the draft of the Warner amendment that was circulating at the end of last week which had statements about why we went to war and marked the progress that had been made politically and economically since then. But the Warner amendment did not raise questions about what our plan is now and how to successfully complete the mission. It did not raise the questions Senator Levin's amendment rightly raises for progress reports from the administration about how we are doing and in that sense did not create an opportunity for a dialogue that can get us beyond the partisan gridlock in our discussions about the war. I wrote a statement last night expressing my frustration on that. I had other concerns about Senator Levin's amendment, including particularly the last paragraph which I believe creates a timetable for withdrawal, and I think that is a mistake, particularly in the next 3 to 6 months as the Iraqis stand up a new government. It may not be the intention of the sponsors, but it does send a message that I fear will discourage our troops because it seems to be heading for the door. It will encourage the terrorists, and it will confuse the Iraqi people and affect their judgments as they go forward. Incidentally, I do thank the Senator from Michigan because I know he and others in the Democratic caucus worked very hard to make this amendment an inclusive amendment. I had the opportunity to make a few suggestions, some of which were accepted, some of which were not. Then I arrive back in Washington today and I find that the Senator from Virginia has decided not to put in that amendment, has seen some real strengths in the amendment of the Senator from Michigan, has cut out a few points as enumerated, that I personally--and Senator Warner and I had no conversation about this--thought weakened or at least I found objectionable. I think it is better to strike the word ``indefinitely,'' that our troops will not stay there indefinitely. Of course they will not stay there indefinitely but to make the telling point that we will stay there as long as conditions require and no longer. I fear that if a timetable is put in at the end, ask for a series of dates of phased deployment, even though they are based on those conditions that were cited, it looks like a withdrawal plan and does not send a sound of strength, the sound of a certain trumpet. The point that I wish to make is that Senator Warner has now taken most of Senator Levin's amendment. The Republican leader, if I could talk in partisan terms, has said to the Democratic leader: We accept most of his amendment with these few changes. I think this is a turning point. It is a significant development in terms of the Senate's consideration of the war in Iraq and hopefully in terms of the administration's consideration as well. The distrust, the lack of dialogue between the executive branch and Democrats in Congress is so deep and complicated now that I cannot even begin to describe how we got to this point. I know it is a bad place to be, particularly when we are at war. I remember the words of the Secretary of War during the Second World War, Henry L. Stimson--this was actually after the war. He said: Sometimes the best way to make a person--and he really meant a nation-- trustworthy is to trust them. That has been lacking in the relations between the executive branch and the Democrats in Congress. I believe Senator Warner, the Republican chairman of the Armed Services Committee, in accepting almost all of the Democratic amendment, has in some sense expanded the trust he feels for the ranking Democrat on the committee and created a process where the administration does have to report to us every 90 days, and if the administration--let me put it another way, respectfully. I hope the White House, the Pentagon, sees this also as a moment of opportunity to engage with the Congress so that we will achieve, after free debate-- and that is exactly what we have heard on the floor tonight--the result Senator Vandenberg spoke to, which is that we will, under our indispensable two-party system, unite our official voice at the water's edge so that America speaks with maximum authority against those who would divide and conquer us in the free world. It is a different kind of enemy, but the extremist Islamist terrorists who face us, as Senator Warner said, from Spain to Indonesia, it is their plan for conquer. They struck us on 9/11. They are preparing to strike us again. If we cannot pull together across party lines to defeat this enemy to our security and our way of life, shame on us, particularly if we are stopped from doing so by momentary partisan political ambitions. So I am going to vote for the Warner amendment--I believe it is a significant step forward--for the reasons I have said, because of the timetable at the end particularly. I am going to respectfully vote against the Levin amendment. I hope the Levin amendment comes up first, and if it is not passed, I hope there is an overwhelming bipartisan vote for the Warner amendment. I cannot resist one final quote from the great Vandenberg--succeeded by another great Senator, I might say, from Michigan, Mr. Levin--and this is that famous speech on January 10, 1945, when he abandoned his long-time isolationism and embraced an internationalist foreign policy, and, boy, did his words speak directly to us in our circumstances in Iraq and around the world today. I hope they give us pause. I hope in some sense--frankly, they give us a bit of discomfort about some of the things that have happened in the political consideration of the war. Here is what Vandenberg said: There are critical moments in the life of every nation, which call for the straightest, the plainest and most courageous thinking of which we are capable. We confront such a moment now. . . . And we do today, as well. Vandenberg continued: . . . It is not only desperately important to America, it is important to the world. It is important not only to this generation, which lives in blood . . . As ours sadly does, as the people who were in the Trade Towers and the Pentagon and Jordan over the weekend and so many other places around the world. . . . It is important to future generations if they shall live in peace. No man in his right senses will be dogmatic in such an hour. I digress to thank the Senator from Virginia for coming across the aisle a long way. I thank the Senator from Michigan for the work he did to make his amendment as inclusive and broad as it was so that it enabled the Senator from Virginia to do that. Vandenberg ended: Each of us can only speak according to his little lights-- and pray for a composite wisdom that shall lead us to a high, safe ground. That is exactly what we need with regard to Iraq today. We have to do what is best for our country. We have to do what is best for the 150,000 Americans who are there. We have to do what best enables us to do what we say we all want to do, which is to successfully complete America's mission in Iraq. The sooner we do that, what is best for our country and our great military, the sooner we will succeed in Iraq, and the sooner we will be able to bring our brave soldiers home. This compromise amendment offered by Senator Warner, building on the excellent work Senator Levin has done, is an enormous step forward toward that higher ground. I thank them both for the work they have done. I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise to bring my colleagues' attention to a provision in sections 231-235 in the Defense authorization bill titled ``High Performance Defense Manufacturing Technology Research and Development.'' I introduced this legislation with my colleague Senator Collins to address erosion in our defense manufacturing base that threatens our national security and ultimately our economy overall. We are running major deficits with China in defense critical manufacturing areas, such as computer hardware--$25 billion--and electronics machinery and parts--$23 billion--as U.S. production drifts offshore. We are transferring major portions of our circuit board, semiconductor, machine tool, and weapon system metal casting manufacturing to China and other nations because of lower wage and lower production costs. Without productivity breakthroughs, the U.S. defense manufacturing base will continue to erode. In the high-tech sector, manufacturing needs and research and development needs are highly correlated. As a result, research and development, R&D, centers are often located near manufacturing facilities. If we continue to lose the manufacturing base, we may well lose over time critical research and development capabilities and damage our ability to innovate. And if we hurt both of those we may also lose our military technical leadership. This ultimately puts our warfighters in harms way. Clearly, the Department of Defense (DOD) has a huge stake in rebuilding the defense manufacturing base. The DOD needs advanced manufacturing technologies and processes to achieve productivity breakthroughs to drive down costs in mature defense supply sectors. But it also needs advanced manufacturing techniques to spark the next generation of advances in defense related technologies; technologies that our warfighters deserve. This legislation proposes four basic things. One, it calls, in section 231, for a R&D effort focused on developing new advanced manufacturing technology and information technology, IT, operating models. The Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, acting through the Director of Defense Research and Engineering and with other appropriate defense programs and agencies such as the Manufacturing Technology Program, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, and other defense research activities, is to undertake research and development to develop critical manufacturing productivity breakthrough approaches and the technologies and systems to support them--section 231(b)(1). These could include such breakthrough opportunity areas as distributed and desktop manufacturing, quality inspection that is built into the production process, small lot manufacturing that is as cost-efficient as mass production, use of revolutionary materials and methods of fabrication, and the ability to manufacture devices and machines at the nanoscale. Productivity breakthroughs will ultimately help reduce weapon systems costs and support surge capacity. The legislation also directs the Under Secretary of the Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics to undertake R&D to develop a new model, an extended production enterprise--section 231(b)(2)--using IT and new business models, that integrates services, design, and manufacturing stages, to achieve major new efficiencies and cost savings. Included as part of this research effort, the development of the interoperable software for the extended production enterprise, and the corresponding interoperability standards behind it should also be a focus working with the defense industries to develop the organizational model required. Two, the legislation directs DOD's Manufacturing Technology Program, ManTech, to undertake technology transition including prototyping and test beds--section 232(a) and (b)--for new manufacturing processes and technologies that emerge from this R&D effort. Collaboration established through a memorandum of agreement--section 232(a)(2)-- between DDRE, ManTech, and other appropriate DOD organizations is needed to ensure an efficient transition of manufacturing technologies from the research stage described above to ManTech, which will undertake the development of prototypes and testbeds--section 232(b). ManTech currently is funded at $237 million for fiscal year 2005, all of which is directly tied to the near term needs of the Services. The Joint Defense Manufacturing Technology Panel, which has coordination responsibility for manufacturing research in DOD, does not have funding independent of the Services to initiate new efforts focusing on longer term, higher risk, higher payoff technologies and processes. Thus, the programs currently underway at ManTech are short-term focused projects addressing immediate needs. ManTech needs to balance the current shorter term portfolio by including a focus on longer term, higher risk manufacturing processes and technology development that are industry game changers and yield big efficiencies and cost savings to DOD. Additionally, the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics should coordinate activities within ManTech-- section 232(b)(2)--with activities under the Small Business Innovation Research Program, SBIR, and the Small Business Technology Transfer Program, STTR. Executive Order 13329, entitled ``Encouraging Innovation in Manufacturing,'' requires all SBIR/STTR Programs to give priority to research programs that help to advance innovation in manufacturing. ManTech could benefit significantly from this work currently underway. Working with industry, ManTech should develop a new program to utilize these new manufacturing improvements and processes in the defense manufacturing base--section 232(c). A key way for ManTech to achieve this would be by collaboratively developing and issuing a new performance threshold--a new benchmark system--to ensure ongoing quality and continuous focus on improved and innovative manufacturing procedures developed through the R&D and prototyping described above. Results from the R&D on manufacturing technologies and processes and on the extended production enterprise would be incorporated into the new performance threshold which could become a new DOD acquisition standard--section 232(c)--for procurement. Similar to the quality focused initiative, 6 Sigma, a program aimed to improve process reproducibility and reliability by eliminating defects and process output variation, this new standard would be disseminated into industry where similar efficiencies and productivity gains could be realized. In order to encourage full adoption of the new manufacturing improvements and processes, including a new performance standard, incentives for contractors in the defense manufacturing base to incorporate and utilize the manufacturing enhancements should subsequently be developed by ManTech--section 232(d)(4). Third, it establishes mechanisms to efficiently disseminate technological developments to the broader defense manufacturing base-- section 232(d)--including outreach through the Department of Commerce's Manufacturing Partnership program, section 232(d)(2), an established program proven to be effective in assisting small and mid-sized American manufacturers, including numerous defense manufacturers and suppliers. It has traditionally focused on providing technical assistance in manufacturing operational efficiency and quality and is now evaluating additional roles in providing tools and assistance to promote innovation. DOD could use this existing mechanism to help it reach its defense manufacturing base with these advances. The Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics should also consider outreach through public-private partnerships--section 232(d)(1). Because the prototyping and engineering development stages are extremely expensive, collaborative facilities and testbeds--section 232(b)(1)--should be established to severely reduce the risk, cost, and time of development for new technologies important for national defense. These centers should also educate and train researchers and employees to help assure smooth production process implementation. Such shared facilities, cost shared with both large and small participating firms that are world-class centers for production development, could potentially solve a key DOD problem in technology transition. Specifically, in implementing the prototype and testbed provisions, section 232(b), the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics can consider establishing one or more pilot manufacturing centers in manufacturing fields important to the production of advanced defense technologies. These centers can be shared production facilities of the Federal Government and the private sector that focus on production development including the invention prototyping and engineering development stages. For example, the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics could permit the participation of State and local governments and could carry out a competition to determine the optimal private sector participants in any manufacturing center. Fourth, the legislation--section 233--directs the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics to identify and develop a strategy working with industry in a technology area beneficial to the military where a technology development roadmap and strategy is needed to ensure the manufacturing technologies and processes are available to support this breakthrough technology. Consideration should be given to next generation technologies such as advanced micromanufacturing and nanomanufacturing, other emerging process technologies, model based enterprise, intelligent systems, enterprise integration and knowledge applications. A task force should be established, in cooperation with the private sector, to map a cross- service strategy for fabrication processes and technologies needed to support the roadmaps identified. Importantly, this legislation not only would fund the needed research in manufacturing technologies and processes but provides the structure to bring the technology to utilization, to avoid the problem of leaving valuable technology ``on the shelf.'' Additionally, it initiates the development of a long-term vision for the Department around manufacturing technologies and processes needed for our military. I would like to point out that this legislation is based on the manufacturing recommendations from the National Innovation Initiative report released by the Council on Competitiveness in December, a report supported by prominent business, academic, and government leaders. Additionally, I received letters from two key manufacturing organizations supporting this proposal, the Association for Manufacturing Technology, AMT, and National Coalition for Advanced Manufacturing, NACFAM, which stress the critical importance of passing this legislation. And lastly, I would like to reiterate that this legislation is in line with the Executive order issued by President Bush to encourage innovation in manufacturing in Federal agencies, including through SBIR and STTR to assist the private sector, especially small businesses in manufacturing innovation efforts. This legislation will help move the U.S. defense manufacturing base ahead of global competition as well as provide support for new technologies that we are at risk of losing. The aim of this legislation is a first step in an overall effort needed to preserve our military excellence and national security. Mr. McCain. Mr. President, I want to speak briefly in favor of a provision in the Department of Defense authorization bill that would require the Department to study the feasibility of procuring satellite capacity through multiyear contracts. I worked with Chairman Warner and Ranking Member Levin to address this issue in the underlying bill, and while I am pleased that the committee's leadership has accepted the provision, I am disappointed that Congress must once again request the Department to study this issue. Last year, Congress included a provision in the Department of Defense authorization bill to require the Department to scrutinize its commercial satellite capacity procurement practices and report to Congress its findings and recommendations. That study was completed, albeit after the statutory deadline and too late for many of the recommendations to be implemented in this year's authorization bill. The study also failed to specifically review the issue of multiyear contracting. Therefore, Congress will be more explicit this year in its request and will once again await the Department's findings. The study on multiyear contracting is necessary because many in the satellite industry and the Government question whether the Department of Defense's general policy of procuring leased satellite capacity on a year-to-year basis is resulting in the best price for the Government and the taxpayers. In contrast to the Government, other entities purchasing leased satellite capacity for communications services, such as CNN and FOX, negotiate multiyear contracts and are receiving lower prices for the same services. The Federal Government, with the Department of Defense as the main buyer, is the world's largest consumer of leased satellite capacity and, as such, the Government should be able to negotiate the lowest price and the most flexible terms for leased satellite capacity. Last year, the Government Accountability Office studied the Department's procurement process for leased satellite capacity and found that the Department's procedures were uncoordinated, frustrating for military commanders, and overly expensive to U.S. taxpayers. Using the results of the GAO study, along with the Department's study completed this year and the findings on the multiyear contract issue, I hope Congress will finally have the necessary information to consider wholesale satellite procurement reforms during next year's authorization process.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise to speak in favor of the amendment that I am privileged to cosponsor with my friend from Missouri. He spoke very comprehensively and eloquently about it. I will say a few words and associate myself with everything he has said. This is all about strategic airlift. It is all about the ability to deploy our forces and the equipment and materials to sustain them to battlefields around the world. The C-17, a remarkable aircraft, has done that with enormous efficiency, reliability, and skill. I have been around here long enough now that I remember when the military was pleading with us in Congress to authorize and appropriate for the development of a new strategic airlift capacity. It became the C-17. I remember the arguments. The strategic airlift is like the long pole in a tent. If the pole is gone, the tent collapses. If you cannot get your forces, material, and equipment to support them to the field of battle around the world--the fields of battle are not only dispersed around the world but in very different circumstances often without typical or conventional airfields on which to land--then you can't fight the battle. From that plea over a period of years came the design and construction of the C-17. I remember the first day I saw the first C-17 fly into an airfield in East Hartford, associated with Pratt & Whitney who, I am proud to say, builds the engines for these planes. It is remarkable. It is an enormous plane. The pilots flew it with an ease and mobility that made it seem like a much smaller plane. It has performed admirably over the years. Time after time, members of the Armed Services Committee, on which the Senator from Missouri and I are privileged to serve, have heard our warfighting commanders tell us that they don't have enough strategic airlift. I am privileged to serve as the ranking Democrat on the Airland Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee. We authorize strategic airlift, and here, too, we have heard over and over, one, about the need and, two, about the enormously impressive performance of the C-17. It is the heart of our strategic airlift. The Air Force, as my friend from Missouri, Senator Talent, has said, has contended over and over-- and this reaches a level of a plea also--that we need 222 C-17s. That is a position held by the U.S. Transportation Command, which is responsible for the planning and providing of strategic transportation for our military. Here is the problem and what brings Senator Talent and I and a very broad group of Senators of both parties to offer this amendment. A study has recently been completed by the Department of Defense called the Mobility Capabilities Study. It concludes, uniquely--no one else has--that the need now is only for 180 C-17s; again, at odds with the Transportation Command. Here is the problem. If that position holds and we stop production of the C-17 at 180, that would mean production would end in 2008 and the production line would close. It is hard to start it up again--impossible to start it up again. A lot of people around the country, including in Connecticut, will lose their jobs. There is a fundamental flaw to the Mobility Capabilities Study. It is simply that the case has not been made that we are going to adequately support our military with 180 of these planes. We need 222. The Mobility Capabilities Study has serious limits and flaws. The first point is that it started several years ago, and its conclusions are based on assumptions that I contend are no longer valid. Among these that concern me most are the assumptions that the planning scenarios in place during the study, the war situation scenarios, need situation scenarios, are still valid. Also, that there will be no increase in demand from revisions in those planning scenarios, that there will be no increase in what we call intertheater demand--within the theater--demand for strategic airlift, and there will be no significant increase in concurrent demand associated with homeland defense at the same time there are major combat operations overseas underway. Senator Talent pointed out that recently the C-17s were used to bring critically important materials into the gulf coast area after Hurricane Katrina struck. I say that all of these assumptions of the Mobility Capabilities Study, which reached this unique conclusion that we will be safe with 180 C-17s, are suspect. The fact is, the Department of Defense is now looking at some very different military planning scenarios which would occasion very significant demand for the C-17 strategic airlift capacity. We know that in-theater demand for this capacity has obviously increased in Iraq because of the danger of ground movement, and the C- 17s have met that need brilliantly and reliably. Subsequent insurgencies, the kinds of unconventional conflicts and threats we are likely to face in the years ahead, will also require the kind of unique capacity that this aircraft has to carry an enormous amount of material or personnel and land in very unconventional and different topographies. There is now, as we know, a Quadrennial Defense Review underway. That is done every 4 years within the Pentagon to sketch out--more than sketch out--to define and delineate the strategic and specific materiel needs of our military to execute the national military strategy. That QDR is underway and probably will address these issues. I personally believe that the QDR will increase the requirement for strategic airlift, not decrease it, as the Mobility Capabilities Study suggests. This amendment is protection against the implementation of the Mobility Capabilities Study numbers prematurely, of the shutting down of these production lines, of the loss of jobs, and of the inability to meet the strategic airlift needs of our military. The amendment says the Secretary of the Air Force may execute a multiyear contract for the 42 more airplanes that would bring us to the 222 standing requirement, that the Department of Defense must reconsider the validity of those Mobility Capabilities Study assumptions during the QDR, and that the production line for the C-17s and all component parts must be kept operating at least at a minimum sustaining rate until we are confident of what we need. This is a hedge against a precipitous and, I would say, dangerous decision made based on a single study done within the Pentagon. I am grateful for the encouragement and, I hope and believe, support of the chairman of the Armed Services Committee and the ranking Democrat. I thank Senator Talent for all the work he has done to bring this forward. It has been a pleasure working with him. I ask my colleagues to support the amendment.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my friend and colleague from Connecticut, Senator Dodd, be added as an original cosponsor of the amendment.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. He has been a steadfast and I would go so far as to say a fervent supporter of the C-17 over the years of the existence of this program, and on behalf of Senator Talent, I ask that when a vote is taken on this amendment, it be taken by rollcall.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, U.S. competitiveness in the high-tech sector of semiconductors, an important enabler in today's world providing the basis for nearly all electronic products and systems used in both consumer and military applications, is at risk. As we all are aware, global competition is on the rise, U.S. basic research investment is on the decline, and there is serious concern regarding the U.S. science and technology talent base. These issues have long been a concern of mine not only for the health of our economy but also for maintaining and preserving our national security. I released a whitepaper back in June of 2003 titled ``National Security Aspects of the Global Migration of the U.S. Semiconductor Industry'' that discusses and highlights the importance of addressing the accelerating shift in manufacturing overseas. Historically, shifts in manufacturing result over time in migration of research and development which, unfortunately, means we will be essentially offshoring our innovation capacity itself. In the March 21, 2005, edition of Business Week, the cover story article titled ``Outsourcing Innovation'' exactly addresses this issue. The article discusses how Western corporations began offshoring manufacturing in the 1980s and 1990s to increase efficiency and to focus on research and development and proceeds to say how ``that pledge has now passed.'' Companies such as Dell, Motorola, and Phillips are buying designs of digital devices from abroad, slightly altering the device, and then branding the product with their name. In addition, there is another aspect of the semiconductor industry that cannot be overlooked, the limitation of Moore's Law. There will soon be physical barriers blocking the continued diminution of transistor size, and the financial barriers will become even more extraordinary. This situation would inevitably lead to the slowing or stopping of chip manufacturer's progress unless we bring nanotechnology to fruition in the semiconductor world. I think it is pretty clear that it is more important than ever to create an environment in the United States which promotes research and development and fosters innovation. The Defense Science Board Task Force released to the Congress in April 2005 the final report titled ``High Performance Microchip Supply'' which was in part a response to the issues I raised in my 2003 report. The report outlines a series of recommendations to help ensure the long-term health of the U.S. microchip design, development, and manufacturing industries. The report emphasizes the importance of maintaining technical superiority in the semiconductor industry in order to lead in the application of electronics to support the warfighter. This lead is critical to the foundation of the next generation of U.S. security strategy network centric warfare superiority. The report specifically stresses the need for trusted and assured suppliers of integrated circuit components and emphasizes that ``trust cannot be added to integrated circuits after fabrication; electrical testing and reverse engineering cannot be relied upon to detect undesired alterations in military integrated circuits.'' Beyond highlighting the threat of IC device compromise, the report also highlights the risk associated with reliance on foreign suppliers to access high-performance microelectronics in time of war when quick response or surge capacity is needed and additionally, the report stresses the longer term risk of losing leading edge R&D in a technology area central to our economy. This latter point was a particular emphasis of my 2003 report referenced previously and this new report agrees. The DSB report calls for the Department of Defense's senior officials to advocate that a strongly competitive U.S. semiconductor base is not only a Department of Defense goal but should also be a national priority. Because DSB finds that research and development is closely coupled with a solid manufacturing base, and the U.S. semiconductor manufacturing base is going abroad, the United States will soon start to lose its R&D skill base which is essential for not only U.S. defense systems but general economic competitiveness. Given the low production volume of Department of Defense microelectronics parts, the report also recommends that the Department of Defense, working with the semiconductor industry and fabrication equipment suppliers, develops a cost-effective technology for the design and fabrication of low production volume, leading edge technology given the low volume demands of the Department of Defense. It states that an overall vision is needed that develops an approach to meet Department of Defense needs before a supply source becomes an emergency. This requires funding research that will sustain our technical superiority; the trusted foundry agreements assist in solving the immediate problems, not the longer term. Included in the overall vision, a plan is needed specifically for a Department of Defense acquisition strategy that encompasses both short- and long-term technology, acquisition and manufacturing capabilities to assure an ongoing supply of trusted microelectronic components. Although U.S. leadership in chip design does not in and of itself assure the trustworthiness of the microelectronic parts, it does put the Department of Defense in a superior position to potential adversaries whose systems rely on U.S. based suppliers. The Department of Defense needs to sustain this U.S. leadership by investing in research programs and ensuring a domestic supply of scientists and engineers who are skilled in this area. New programmable chip technology, which has intricate designs and therefore is more difficult to validate, is needed and efforts to develop next generation technologies in this area should be pursued. This DSB report clearly stresses the need for immediate action and lists key recommendations to help the Department of Defense develop not only a short-term plan to address the immediate needs but, importantly, a longer term vision as well. By the end of 2005, there will be 59 300 mm fabrication plants worldwide with only 16 of these located in the United States. The United States cannot wait much longer; we need to address the global competitiveness issue today. The Department of Defense has been telling us for a year or more to wait for the Defense Science Board report. It has now finally arrived and an actual Department of Defense ``action plan'' to implement these recommendations is needed. This is why I along with Senator Cornyn proposed an amendment, No. 2446, to the Defense Authorization Act, S. 1042, asking the Department of Defense to develop this action plan. I am pleased to see this amendment has been adopted unanimously by the Senate. The United States historically has lost manufacturing sectors as product cycles matured but our innovation system always filled that void by creating new sectors, opportunities, jobs and higher standards of living. I want to see that trend continue, and this amendment asks the Department of Defense to form a sound plan in this technology area.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, a very important provision is being passed in this year's reconciliation bill establishing Medicare Value- Based Purchasing Programs. Value-based purchasing brings a pay-for- performance provision to Medicare. Senator Grassley and Senator Baucus and the Finance Committee staff on both sides of the aisle have pushed forward an initiative that has been needed for a long time in American health care. I applaud them for their efforts. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that less than 55 percent of patients in America receive appropriate medical care. This means that if you go to the doctor and have pneumonia there is a good chance you may not receive the right antibiotic; or CPR might be performed on a patient with the incorrect number of breaths; or you may not receive the best surgery for your heart condition. Americans are not systematically receiving appropriate medical treatment. And receiving appropriate medical treatment should not be a matter of luck. We know that it is too easy for Americans to get inappropriate medical care. But there are patient groups throughout our country that are in even more medical danger. Disparities in health care quality in minority groups are well documented. This would mean that a Hispanic or African-American male is less likely to receive the right medication for a heart condition than a White male. These findings are not related to income, insurance status, age, or what hospital a person goes to, among other factors. Special attention must be paid to minority patient groups in our current efforts to improve the quality of medical care in the U.S. The 2003 Institute of Medicine report, Unequal Treatment, recommended that the ``collection, reporting, and monitoring of patient care data by health plans and federal, and state payors should be encouraged'' to move towards eliminating health disparities. My amendment to section 6110 S. 1932 addresses this IOM recommendation to more specifically encourage the collection and reporting of health care quality data for both majority and minority groups as Medicare Value-Based Purchasing Programs are being developed and established. My amendment encourages the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to focus on diseases where there are disparities between majority and minority groups. Diseases such as infant mortality, diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer, cervical cancer, HIV/AIDS, childhood immunizations, and adult immunizations are all disproportionately problematic in minority patient groups. They must be considered in any systematic attempt to measure and improve health care quality. My amendment also encourages the collection of specific data on patient characteristics that are key to measuring and collecting data on health care quality. Collecting information on gender, race/ ethnicity, language spoken, and insurance status are encouraged. Without this information, we will not have any way of knowing whether or not disparities between majority and minority groups are decreasing. In the existing provisions of section 6110, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services will work with various expert groups in development and implementing quality measurement systems. However, experts in minority health are not currently included in the legislation. My amendment ensures that experts in minority health will be included in developing and implementing a health care quality measurement system. Lastly, my amendment would reward hospitals, physicians, clinics, and home health care providers, among other groups that demonstrate improvement in quality of care for patient subgroups and minorities. I thank Senators Grassley and Baucus and the Finance Committee staff for working with us to try to focus necessary attention on the health care needs of all Americans. This would mark the first time our Federal Government made a commitment to improving the quality of health care that minority groups--our constituents--are receiving. I believe this groundbreaking legislation to bring pay-for-performance accountability to Medicare is an important step forward and I believe it will be much more powerful and have much greater impact if we tackle how to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in health care.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to announce the launching of the first Jewish Social Action Month--a month where Jews around the world will be encouraged to engage in good works and service to their communities. I am joined in this effort by my colleague in the House, Congressman Steve Israel of New York, as well as members of the Israeli Knesset. Throughout the month--and every year in the second month of the Hebrew calendar, Heshvan, from here on out--Jews from across the globe will be encouraged to perform acts of loving kindness to their neighbors, regardless of faith. The concept of Social Action can be interpreted broadly and there are endless possibilities for action. The Israeli Friends of the Earth, for example, will be launching initiatives to clear up the debris which ruins our countryside. In Boston, Jewish students are working to help students in inner city schools develop their reading and writing skills. In New York, Jewish groups are delivering Thanksgiving meals to the elderly who are housebound. These are just three quick examples of the kinds of service we hope people will be inspired to undertake in November and continue year round--inspiring people of all faiths to join in service to their neighbors as well. The idea for Jewish Social Action Month came from two young men-- Josef Abramowitz of Boston and Aryeah Green of Israel--during a retreat in the Israeli desert. They wanted a way to motivate people of all ages to realize the words of The Scriptures that tells us to help those who have the least among us. For instance, in Deuteronomy we are told to love a poor stranger and give him food and clothing because we too were strangers in Egypt and God fed and clothed us. The President of Israel, Moshe Katsav, has been an enthusiastic supporter of Jewish Social Action Month and is lending the prestige of his office in Israel to urge that people heed this call to community service. I want to thank all of those individuals, groups, synagogue and temple leadership and membership who are joining this effort. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a number of statements and articles relating to Jewish Social Action Month.