Rob Portman

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. I ask unanimous consent that the committee-reported substitute amendment be agreed to; that the bill be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I want to thank Senator Ernst for putting this colloquy together. What she just said with regard to the importance of having reliable sources here in America is absolutely right. The supply chain issue is one that I hope we will address in this COVID package--for starters, with regard to our personal protective gear, the PPE, because if we can't rely on having masks and gowns and other PPE made here in America, it is tough for us, particularly during an international pandemic like this, to build and rely on countries like China. Also, frankly, some of the product that comes from China has not been reliable itself. I appreciate what you are doing there and also the work you are doing to encourage us to be more resourceful here at home, to be sure we are doing the things we have to do to protect ourselves from foreign influence, including China. Part of our issue with China, I think, is that for the last several years, a lot of us point fingers at China and we are not pointing fingers, frankly, at our internal problems. We need to get our house in order here in America and protect ourselves better. We have legislation to do that, which we just reported out of the Governmental Affairs Committee today. It has to do with this issue of China coming to the United States and systemically targeting promising research and promising researchers, and saying: We would like to get that research. The research is often supported by the U.S. taxpayer. It is sort of tough here for us in America to lose our research and our innovation and our intellectual property to other countries. It is particularly tough when taxpayers pay for it, and $150 billion a year of taxpayer money goes to the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy to do basic research. That is good. We have helped to develop important therapies and cures for some kinds of cancer. We helped to develop the internet. It has been very helpful on manufacturing processes. A lot of great things have come out of that research. But one thing that really troubles me is that for 20 years now, with China taking the lead and other countries, as well--Iran, North Korea, and others--they have again targeted these researchers and this research and said: We want to get that. And, frankly, they get it on the cheap because the research is being paid for by our tax dollars. Let me give you an example of what I am talking about. Recently, in my home State of Ohio, there was a case along these lines. I applaud the FBI and the Department of Justice and our U.S. attorneys for finally getting on top of this issue. We spent a year studying this issue here in the Congress in what is called the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which I chair. We found out that this was a huge problem and wrote a report late last year. In the report, we implored our Federal law enforcement agencies to get on this issue. In fact, we had a hearing where an FBI agent testified and said that it is true. We haven't been focused on this, and we have to make that up now. They are making up for it. They are arresting a number of people. They are doing the things that should be done to try to stop some of this stealing, really, of our seed corn, our technology, our innovation, our intellectual property. Here is the Ohio example. Recently, the FBI announced that it had arrested a researcher connected with the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University. This individual had received a huge grant from the National Institutes of Health, or NIH. That grant was for about $3.6 million. But then this same individual-- of course, not telling NIH or telling Cleveland Clinic or Case Western or anybody else--had accepted money from China. In the contracts that we were able to research during our investigation, these contracts with China say you are not allowed to reveal that you have this relationship with China, that you are getting the money from China. They not only gave this guy money--$3 million-- but they gave him a deanship at Wuhan University. They gave him money to hire people in Wuhan. They gave him the ability to travel around America recruiting others. We think he recruited 30 or 40 people, according to the FBI. Again, these are all allegations. His arrest has been made. He actually is alleged to have taken biological samples from Cleveland, OH, to China--this taxpayer-paid NIH research--literally, physically taking these to China. They also, by the way, provided lodging for him with a three-bedroom apartment in Wuhan. That is luxury. This is about money. Unfortunately, this is about people who are not patriots but instead are willing to sell us out by selling their research, their expertise that our taxpayers have funded to China and other countries. NIH, recently, by the way, fired or forced the resignation of 54 researchers--not 1 or 2 or 3, but 54 people. We have been pushing them hard to find out who these people are and what they are doing. They haven't been willing to reveal that yet because this is a matter under investigation. They have told us that of those who are under investigation at NIH, 90 percent have ties to China--90 percent. Wake up, America. Here we are. We are in a situation where other countries, particularly China, have targeted American research, American researchers, and are now taking this back to China to benefit their military, to benefit their economy, and to benefit their healthcare system. By the way, I do not believe this is for academic purposes. It is wrong what is happening, but it is even more wrong because this is not as if they are taking it back to do joint research on an academic basis. Let me tell you what the State Department told us at our hearing on this topic at the end of last year. They said: ``The Chinese Communist Party has declared the Chinese university system to be on the front line of military-civilian fusion efforts for technology acquisition.'' This is our own State Department. That means there is a clear link between the research that is being taken in America and the latest advancement in China's military and its economy. It has been happening for 20 years. It is time to put an end to it. The legislation that we were able to get through committee today takes a really important step in that direction. There are four or five elements of it. One of the most important to me is giving the FBI and law enforcement the tools they need to go after these individuals by creating a new criminal law that says if you lie on these forms, if you are taking money from China, it is certainly a conflict of commitment and a conflict of interest. You can be taken to task for that and held accountable. Right now you can't. They are arresting these people on things like mail fraud, tax evasion. It is a little like how they used to go after gangsters before there were laws directly related to racketeering and so on. This is something where we need to be sure that we are giving people the tools that they need. We also help the State Department to keep these people out, and we help with regard to our universities to ensure that we are reporting and being transparent as to the money universities are receiving from China and other countries. Again, I thank my colleague from Iowa for having this colloquy. I see we have two other colleagues here. I know they are really well-versed and involved in these issues, and I want to hear from them, as well. I would just say that I hope, on a bipartisan basis--by the way, our legislation is bipartisan. Our investigation was bipartisan. I would say this is nonpartisan. This is an American issue. We should all be standing up to protect the American research enterprise and to be sure that our taxpayers, when they pay for this important research, have the benefit of it rather than its being taken, in particular, by China to benefit their military and their economy, which has been going on for 2 decades. It is time to wake up. I yield to my colleague from Arizona.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, the legislation that Senator Alexander is talking about probably is something we ought to look at in connection with this legislation that we are likely to pass here in the Congress in the next week or so regarding the COVID-19 crisis that we face. I am here on the floor today to talk about that--to talk about what the next steps ought to be and how we should be responding as Congress to this unprecedented challenge we have of the pandemic. We are now about 5 months into it, and for much of April and certainly in the month of May we were seeing pretty good progress on the coronavirus pandemic. The situation was improving, and many of us thought we were turning the corner. Unfortunately, as we have moved into June and July, we are now trending in the wrong direction in much of the country. Over the past week, the number of hospitalizations, for instance, has risen in many of our States, and there is concern that the situation could worsen when the weather begins to cool. Today, in Ohio, our Governor announced a statewide mask mandate, as an example. We have not had that yet. He did so because he is concerned about some of the numbers. Ohio is not in as bad a shape as some of the States, but we are not seeing the progress we hoped for. The past few months have been a somewhat better story for the economy. After the initial shocks of the self-imposed economic shutdown this past spring, a couple months ago, we have seen a steady rebound taking place in most parts of the country. New unemployment claims, put out just last week, while still far too high compared to where we were before this pandemic, are the lowest we have seen since the crisis began. Recent retail sales numbers are about where they were a year ago when there was no pandemic. So we are seeing better improvement in the economy as compared to the disappointing progress we were making recently on the pandemic Thanks to unprecedented Federal action, such as the Paycheck Protection Program which has allowed small businesses to keep their doors open and to retain employees, thanks to some of the targeted tax relief to help our families and also our businesses, we have been able to prevent an even more serious economic collapse that in my view would have had a devastating impact on all of us. However, we are not out of the woods yet. There are still, roughly, 17 million Americans out of work. That is a lot of Americans who have been furloughed through no fault of their own because businesses are not operating. This corresponds to about an 11-percent unemployment rate, more than three times higher than it was just 5 months ago. You will recall that in February we had historically low unemployment. Now we are up to 11 percent. Of course, there are parts of the economy that have not seen the progress that other parts have. So there is a lot for us to consider now that Congress is back in session and now that we are in the middle of negotiating this new what they call the phase 5 coronavirus rescue package. The new legislation will have a significant impact on how we address these dual healthcare and economic crises. That is why it is important, and more important than ever, that we figure out how to work together, Republicans and Democrats alike, and make some smart bipartisan policy decisions. Unfortunately, that is not the way the House of Representatives has proceeded to date. The House Democrats chose to construct their own proposal. It is called the Heroes Act. Rather than working constructively across the aisle to try to find some common ground to help Americans deal with this healthcare and economic crisis, Democrats chose and made and released an 1,800-page, $3.5 trillion package that included some provisions that have nothing to do with COVID-19. How big is $3.5 trillion? Well, that makes it the biggest piece of legislation ever passed by either the House or Senate in the history of our country. Never have we had legislation that expensive. Also, $3.5 trillion is just a lot of money. The budget last year was $4.5 trillion--the entire budget for the entire year for our country. This one bill is $3.5 trillion. So it is not only the most costly legislation ever to pass, but, again, it is not just about COVID-19. In fact, one Democratic leader called it ``a tremendous opportunity to fix things to fit our vision,'' which is why it passed by a nearly party- line vote. If true, by the way, that vision entails raising taxes on some small businesses; it includes giving out tax breaks, largely to benefit very wealthy individuals on both coasts; it has direct payouts to illegal immigrants; it has immigration reforms related to ICE and other things; it has unprecedented mandates on the States to require mail-in voting and telling States, by the way, that they are required to have certain kinds of ID. This has always been within the province of the States to run their own election systems. That is in this legislation. At the same time, out of $3.5 trillion and 1,800 pages, there is nothing in it to provide liability protection to our schools, hospitals, and small businesses; no funding for the Paycheck Protection Program; no assistance for Americans trying to get back to work. It is $3.5 trillion in taxpayer money being appropriated on a party-line vote. I don't think that is what people are looking for. I think they want us to get together, as we have already with four previous COVID-19 legislative packages, and work together to try to get it done. We have to find that common ground. We have to be sure we pass something that is bipartisan, that supports our healthcare system, our schools, our local governments, our employers, our families, and that we do it in as targeted a way as possible given the fact that we have already the largest deficit in the history of our country this year, and, of course, all this adding to our national debt. We need to do it based on good data on what has been spent and what remains to be done. We need to keep in mind what is the most important policy proposals to include in this legislation and not make it a catchall. First, and most importantly in my view, we need to increase funding for the healthcare response and the safety efforts. This is the underlying problem: Until we focus on this pandemic and what the virus is doing, we can spend all the money we want around here, and it is not going to make much of a difference. So we have to be sure that we are focused on the actual problem. I think that means getting our healthcare professionals the resources they need to effectively respond to this crisis. They need more funding. We need more funding for testing, contact tracing, PPE--the personal protective gear that, unfortunately, we still don't have the stockpiles here that we need. We need to be sure we are doing everything we can do to get this antiviral medication up and going. We have one, Remdesivir, that is showing positive results. We need to make sure that we are doing everything we can to get this vaccine as fast as possible because with a vaccine, as we have with the common flu, we will be making tremendous progress in pushing back against the virus. Stopping the spread of the virus has to be our top priority in this next bill, as it has been in some of the other legislation. It is clear from the recent resurgence in cases that we are still not where we need to be in testing. I know there has been a lot of discussion recently about testing and whether it is needed or not. I will tell you it is critical because we need to know where the disease is and how it may be spreading. It also gives us much greater context in taking steps toward reopening in a safe way, whether it is our schools or whether it is our businesses, going to restaurants, going to bowling allies, movie theaters. Testing is very important. Last week, I was in Columbus, OH, at the Columbus Health Department, where officials told me what a huge difference the CARES grant that they received has made in being able to expand testing. They are building a track to monitor and maintain the virus in Franklin County that is needed right now, and they are doing a great job. They are providing testing that is driveby testing. It is easy to access. If you don't have insurance to pay for it, it is covered through CARES funding that passed in the Congress. We are being sure that the funding is providing the best information available as we fight this invisible enemy. We have to continue to do that to prioritize bolstering the ability of our healthcare officials at home and to be able to coordinate the response--State level, local and national levels, and testing, obviously, is key to that. In addition, as more parts of our country are putting in place safe plans to reopen our economy, we want to make sure that the individuals who went on the COVID-19 unemployment lines in the early days of this pandemic have the opportunity and the incentive to reenter the workforce. We have to be sure our workplaces are safe. This week, I introduced legislation called the healthy workplace tax credit, a credit on payroll taxes to ensure employers can afford additional safety measures, from the Plexiglas you have probably seen in some places, the shields to be able to protect people, to the PPE that is needed, the gowns in some cases, the masks, the gloves, hand sanitizer, to be able to afford that, and to be sure that there is testing in place so employees and consumers feel safe reentering the economy. This tax credit will support our efforts to make our workplaces healthy and safe and to build consumer confidence that all appropriate measures are being taken. It doesn't really matter what we say as elected officials. It doesn't matter what our Governors are saying or local health officials. If people don't feel safe or feel comfortable, they are not going to reengage in the economy and step forward. I think this kind of a tax credit should be something that both sides of the aisle can strongly support, and we can ensure that we are doing everything we can to get people back to a more normal life. As we tackle this healthcare challenge head-on, we also can't afford to step back on our efforts to combat the drug epidemic. Remember the opioid crisis that we were facing over the last couple of years. It has devastated communities all around our country, including my home State of Ohio. Unfortunately, we are seeing, during the coronavirus pandemic, the number of addictions, overdoses, and overdose deaths is growing. This is very concerning, particularly because, thanks to a lot of efforts, including efforts in this body, to provide more treatment and recovery and prevention services, we were finally making progress in 2018. In my State of Ohio we had a 22-percent decrease in opioid overdose deaths. Every single year for the previous dozen years we had seen increases, and, finally, we were making progress. Now, unfortunately, we seem to be backtracking because of the COVID-19 crisis. People are isolated, and people are feeling anxiety. People are not being able to access the treatment they used to be able to access. So in this legislation, we should also be sure that we make permanent the progress we have made recently with coronavirus in providing more telehealth treatment, making that more accessible. I have introduced legislation called the TREAT Act that would do just that so we don't lose ground on this other deadly disease. We also need to look forward to the fall and ensure that we have funding to support the schools so they are able to safely reopen their doors to students. Keeping our children out of the classroom for a protracted period of time has already had a negative impact on many of them with regard to educational advancement. We have heard this from the experts, the American Pediatric Society, and the pediatricians back home--the doctors who are looking at this situation are saying it is very helpful in terms of getting kids back to school for education but also for their mental health and for their social skills. On top of that, many parents, of course, have been forced to make impossible decisions. Do they go to work to earn a paycheck or do they stay home to take care of their child. So reopening the schools will have the effect of having childcare, which is very important. We need to act fast to ensure children don't lose more progress. Our phase 5 legislation should provide funding to help our schools safely reopen, whether it is providing additional masks, gloves or other protective gear or other resources we have talked about, I think that money is well spent. Second, we have to get the economy moving again. To do that, I believe we need to remove the disincentive currently in place; whereby, interestingly, we tried to help on unemployment insurance, but we provided a flat $600 payment that has actually disincentivized a lot of people from going back to work. Why? Because most individuals are making more on unemployment insurance than at their previous job. A University of Chicago study says that 60 to 70 percent of those who are on unemployment insurance are making more on UI than they did when working. As part of this negotiation, I believe Congress should and will extend the additional Federal unemployment insurance benefit in some form, but you shouldn't get paid more not to work. I think that is a principle that we all agree with, I hope, on both sides of the aisle. We should fix this disincentive to work by making the benefit a percentage of your previous income. By the way, a July 13 Yahoo Finance-Harris Poll found that 62 percent of Americans believed these enhanced UI benefits served as a disincentive to work. They are right. It doesn't have to be that way. We can help people to ensure they get the support they need but not have them being paid more than they would if they were going to work. Depending on how high the Federal payment is, by the way, we ought to also consider a return-to-work bonus for individuals that they receive on top of their paycheck--in other words, take part of the Federal benefit with them back to work. I have been promoting this since May. We haven't been able to pass it yet around here, but I think this would help people--help those workers who do want to go back to work to be able to make that tough decision without having a financial disincentive. It would help our small businesses and others who need the workforce badly, and it would help our economy begin to be able to reopen properly. This idea, by the way, has broad support across the country. That same poll I talked about found that 69 percent of respondents support a return-to-work bonus. There are various ways we can accomplish this goal, but I believe it would be helpful if it is paired with an extension of the unemployment insurance. So this is something we have to focus on and come up with a bipartisan consensus--a compromise--to ensure that we are not paying people more not to work but ensure we are taking care of people who are furloughed through no fault of their own. I also think we should be considering provisions to help incentivize the hiring from the employer side, so it is also providing more of an incentive to bring people on board. A way to do this that makes a lot of sense to me because it is building on legislation we have already passed is to expand and repurpose the work opportunity tax credit to add a category for COVID-19 furloughed individuals. Also, the employee retention tax credit from the CARES Act we passed just a short while ago can be improved to make it more encompassing and a better hiring credit. Helping to subsidize the marginal cost of a new hire will allow businesses to ramp up operations more quickly as the economy reopens, while also bringing more individuals off of the unemployment rolls and into the workforce. I hope these are part of whatever legislative package we end up with. Again, these two should be bipartisan. The work opportunity tax credit has always been bipartisan. The retention tax credit was bipartisan in the CARES Act. These are things we can do, and they should get done. We should be sure to stick with what has worked to this point in our coronavirus response. One of the biggest successes, of course, has been the PPP loan program. However, one flaw in the original law creating the PPP program was that it put in place barriers to loans for those owners who had unrelated felony records. This was brought to my attention by a constituent of mine. His name is Troy Parker. He is a person who has done everything you would expect and you would want someone to do who comes off of a felony conviction-- a mistake that he made. He was given a second chance, and he took it. He started a small business. It is a cleaning business, and he hires a lot of other second-chance individuals--returning citizens. He gives them a chance, an opportunity, and he has been successful. But during the coronavirus pandemic, he lost a lot of his business, as you can imagine, so he applied for a PPP loan. He was told he couldn't get one. Why? Because he has a felony record. He has a conviction for a financial crime, and it was within the last 5 years. It was several years ago, but it was in the last 5 years, so he couldn't get a PPP loan. Well, he is just the kind of individual we would want to help. Thanks to Troy, we engaged on this issue when we learned about it. We worked with the Treasury Department. We got some immediate relief in terms of a rule, but we now have to put that into law to provide the relief that is needed to provide certainty and to codify it. The Paycheck Protection Program Second Chance Act does that. It is bipartisan. Senator Cardin and I introduced this legislation. It has to be part of the next bill because it makes so much sense. We also need a plan to adapt our economy for a future where many individuals may be living more of their lives at home and online. This is easier in some urban areas where you have access to broadband, but it can be a huge hurdle in some other areas, particularly rural parts of our country, including parts of Ohio. Think about it. We rely much more on telehealth, much more on telelearning, and much more on teleworking. Yet, in many parts of the country, there is no access to the kind of Wi-Fi, the kind of broadband that you need to do so effectively. Earlier this month, I introduced bipartisan and bicameral legislation to accelerate broadband access across the country to help our economy. Rural America deserves the same level of access to broadband, and including this legislation in this phase 5 package would help them get it faster. Third, we need to solve the growing problem of State and local governments running out of funding the longer this crisis continues. This has affected some critical public safety services like EMS, firefighters, and police departments, leaving more Americans vulnerable at the worst possible time. Ohio is particularly vulnerable because many of our local governments are so reliant on income taxes. In fact, the Brookings Institute has determined that four of the top five cities of America that will feel the largest fiscal impact are probably cities in Ohio. Back in April, Senator Brown and I urged the Treasury to provide more flexibility so local governments can use the CARES funding that has been provided for critical services like police and fire. While the administration--thanks to Secretary Mnuchin understanding and acting on this--did so administratively, it now has to be codified to be sure we have the needed certainty. When I was home the last few weeks, I heard a lot about this from our county commissioners, our municipalities, and our mayors saying: We don't know if we can use these funds this way or that way. We have to be sure we have some certainty here. We don't want to have to repay this money. So this codification will also be very important. The flexibility, I hope, is something that both sides of the aisle can agree to. Why shouldn't we have more flexibility with regard to the CARES funding? By the way, some of it hasn't been spent yet. As an example, in Ohio we still have $850 million that is slated to go to the local communities, to our commissioners, and to our mayors for our cities that are under 500,000. Yet we don't have the flexibility and certainty we need there. That is important to pass as part of this legislation. These are just a few policy proposals, I believe, that can make an immediate and lasting impact in our response to the challenges we face with this coronavirus pandemic. I am sure that in the coming days, we will be discussing the next steps forward in-depth because I believe we all recognize how important it is to get this right and to move quickly on it. Unemployment, by the way, expires--that $600--on July 31, at the end of next week. That is a deadline we can't let pass. We are facing a momentous test of our ability to come together once again to address a disease that has changed almost every aspect of our lives, seemingly overnight. It is our responsibility to do that. Now is the time to put aside partisanship, get away from our partisan corners, and work together on some of these constructive solutions. I look forward to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle--my colleague from Washington State, my colleagues from North Dakota, and my colleagues who I know share my concern that we can't allow this opportunity to pass. We have to once again come together. As we said tonight, there are many of these things that are bipartisan, where there can be a lot of consensus. We have to move forward to support our healthcare system, our schools, our employers, and our families as we work to overcome this crisis. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Tennessee for focusing on the American Great Outdoors Act. I had come to the floor to talk about the COVID-19 legislation we are considering, but I am very pleased to be here with my colleagues who helped to get this legislation across the finish line. It is incredibly important and truly historic for our national parks. I have spent more than a dozen years on this. It is kind of embarrassing because I wasn't very successful for the first 11, but from my days as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, I have been focused on what really is a tragic situation--about a $12 billion now maintenance backlog in our national parks, far more than the parks could ever afford to take care of based on our annual budgets that we provide them from this place and yet something that had to be done. So it is not very exciting for some people to think about, gosh, fixing a visitor's center or making sure a trail isn't eroding into a river, making sure that our roads and bridges in our national parks are kept up to speed, so that when you go to a national park you can actually use the restroom facilities and the lodges. But we have had a huge problem with finding funding for that, and in this legislation, as was noted by my colleague from Tennessee, who has been at this for many years, as well, we are finally doing something to help our parks that is badly needed. The priority projects--$6.5 billion worth--will now be handled by legislation that passed the House today by a 310-to-107 vote and passed the Senate a few weeks ago. The President has agreed to sign it, and it will keep our promise, and it is a debt unpaid to our parks. Without it, future generations wouldn't have the opportunity to visit and enjoy these incredible treasures. I spent the last few weeks at a couple of our national parks--one, the Charles Young home in Ohio, which is a beautiful historic home that is actually a station on the Underground Railroad and, therefore, has particular and very important historic significance for our State. Charles Young was the first Black colonel in the U.S. Army, the first Black superintendent of a national park, and his home needs to be preserved for future generations. And yet the maintenance backlog is huge there, as you can imagine, and without this legislation, they would not be able to make progress. I got to see specifically what the money is going for, which is making sure that house still stands years from now so that people, particularly young people in our community, can understand the history of our country--the good and the bad, the cooperation and the seeking for freedom that came from the Underground Railroad and the incredible leadership that Charles Young showed as an early African-American pioneer, both in the military and in our national park system. And then I was at the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, where I had the opportunity to see the 13th most visited park in America and a number of different needs that they have, adding up to about $50 million. Their annual budget, by the way, is about $11 million, and yet they have $50 million worth of things that have to be fixed. I saw trails literally falling into the river. I saw railroad tracks for the beautiful scenic railroad that runs through there where the tracks have to be replaced. I saw a bridge that is truly becoming dangerous and has to be fixed--an historic bridge. These are things that can't be done with their normal budget that funds the rangers and some programs. These are capital expenses, things that have to have a separate funding source, the way we budget around here, and we are doing that now. So after many years of trying different efforts at this and finding some success over the years--the Centennial Act has helped a little bit and some other things to get private-public partnership money--we now have the ability to really say that the parks are going to be in good shape for our kids, our grandkids, and the future generations that can enjoy what Lamar Alexander has referred to--I think, paraphrasing Ken Burns--as America's best idea. With that, I yield back. I would like some time in a moment to talk about the COVID-19 legislation, but I would like to yield now to the Senator from Tennessee.

Mr. PORTMAN

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

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am on the floor today to talk about the annual National Defense Authorization Act to support our servicemembers and their families. This is one of the few things that the Senate actually passes and does so on a bipartisan basis, and I am hopeful we will do that again. It is because Republicans and Democrats alike recognize it is imperative to give the men and women serving in our Armed Forces the resources and support they need to carry out their critical missions for all of us. This year, I am pleased to recognize the importance of ensuring that our troops get compensated properly for the hard work and sacrifices they make. It has an across-the-board 3-percent pay increase in it. They deserve it. On July 4, as we celebrate 244 years of freedom, I think it is appropriate that we demonstrate our support for the brave men and women in uniform whose sacrifices have ensured the liberty we are celebrating. I am also pleased that there is a lot in here that is really important to the people I represent in Ohio. At Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, which is our State's largest single-site employer, the bill authorizes $23.5 million for important work on a new hydrant fuel system for the Defense Logistics Agency. It will make a big difference to our airmen and Air Force civilians and to the troops around the world who rely on DLA for their equipment and resources. There is also $35 million for enhanced energy efficiency at Wright- Patterson's National Air and Space Intelligence Center, NASIC. We are so proud to have NASIC in Ohio, and we are happy to see this additional investment in infrastructure for NASIC. Hopefully, the Space Command will end up in Ohio as well. There is also $15 million in the bill for construction of a new Guard readiness center in Columbus, OH, which will serve as a staging area for the Ohio National Guard, which is increasingly being called upon to respond to crises. I will have a chance to visit with some of our Guard members next week in Ohio, and I look forward to it. One of the bill's other important initiatives that has a big impact on my State is authorizing $1.4 billion to upgrade and modify Abrams tanks. It authorizes about $847 million to build and upgrade the Stryker armored fighting vehicles. There is also an additional $378 million to produce 72 Stryker chassis to support the Army's Maneuver Short Range Air Defense Program. This is all really great news for our men and women in uniform. Why? Because they are going to get from Lima, OH, the best equipment in the world to be able to protect themselves and keep the peace. These Abrams and Stryker vehicles are the most advanced and lethal tanks and armored vehicles on the battlefield today. Of course, this isn't just a big win for our military; it is also great for the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center, which I call the tank plant--always have. It is in Lima, OH, and it is the only facility in the world that can do what they do. It is certainly the only facility in the United States that has the capacity and the highly trained personnel capable of producing Abrams tanks and Stryker armored vehicles. It is a strategic asset for our country and a source of employment for some truly outstanding engineers, welders, and other technicians. I love going to the plant and talking to them about what they do. A lot of them are veterans, and all of them believe that they are part of the effort. The Obama administration, by the way, 9 years ago, wanted to shutter this plant. They said that we wouldn't need tanks in the future and we should shut down the plant and shut down the line, which would have cost billions of dollars to mothball and then try to start it again. Thank goodness we didn't do that. We fought hard against it. I recognized it was the wrong decision and fought against it every step of the way. I remember, at the time, some of the taxpayer groups were saying: Oh, my gosh, this is somehow inappropriate to keep funding going when the Obama administration says it is not necessary. But it was necessary. It was necessary then, and, boy, it is certainly necessary now. We saved the taxpayers a lot of money by not shutting it down. We provided enough funding to keep it open partly by bringing in foreign sales, and I helped in that, to try to get other countries to try to use our tank plant, which they have and still do. We also reversed years of backlogged maintenance recently, and we ensured our workers have a safe environment in which to work. So it is doing well now. The lines are humming. Thank goodness we kept it open. In 2018, I had the opportunity to be the first Member of Congress to see the latest model of the Stryker Dragoon vehicles. They have a 30- millimeter turret--a cannon on top of an armored vehicle. This is a wheeled armored vehicle with a turret on top of it. That 30-millimeter cannon replaced the normal 50-caliber machine gun. The 50-caliber machine gun is effective in certain instances, but the 30-millimeter cannon is much more effective in many places on the battlefield, particularly in Europe, given the threat we face there. So whether it is in Eastern Europe in the Baltic States or being prepositioned in Germany for the possibility of having to respond, this is what our military wants, what our Army wants, and we have to continue to provide our soldiers this Dragoon variant of the Stryker so that they can deter aggression from Russia and others and help keep our allies safe. This includes, by the way, Ukraine. Talking about Ukraine, it has been in the headlines a lot over the last several months. I have been to Ukraine several times. I had the opportunity to be on the frontline in Ukraine at what is called the line of contact. Let me tell you, it is not a cold war; it is very much a hot war. I know that here, on this side of the Atlantic, what is happening in Ukraine can sometimes seem like it is half a world away and maybe doesn't affect us, but it is not far away, and it does affect us. It is very relevant. In a sense, it is where the modern battle is taking place between two very different ideologies, one of freedom and democracy and wanting to connect to the West, and that is modern Ukraine. That is exactly what President Zelensky and the Parliament there and others want to do. The other would be the oligarchy and the corruption of Russia, which want to pull Ukraine back into their orbit. In Ohio we have a large Ukrainian community, particularly in Northeast Ohio, and they certainly have a vested interest in seeing that their ancestral homeland can defend itself from Russian aggression as it works to align itself more with NATO and the West while promoting the platform of democracy, freedom, transparency, and free markets. I have met with President Zelensky several times, and I am encouraged by his commitment and his passion to keeping Ukraine on the right track, including fighting corruption. We have to continue as a country to ensure that elimination of corruption continues in Ukraine. I was pleased to see that Ukraine was very recently designated as a NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner, and one day I hope to welcome them as a full member of NATO. We are passing, I hope, a unanimous consent resolution in this body with regard to this issue. We need to be sure and let Ukraine know we support them. For the past 4 years, I have worked to include provisions in the NDAA, the Defense bill we are working on now, that help expand military assistance to Ukraine and build on the Ukraine military security assistance initiative. This year I was pleased that the bill again authorizes $250 million in lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine. That includes $125 million in lethal assistance that they need. That is an increase of $75 million from last year's budget. So we are doing even more to help allow the Ukrainians to defend themselves. New this year, this bill includes my proposal to require the Departments of State and Defense to develop a new multiyear strategy to support the development of Ukraine's military forces, increasing its capability and capacity and providing a resource plan for U.S. security assistance. I had the opportunity to speak today to General Dayton, who will be nominated by the President to be the next Ambassador to Ukraine. This is a guy who has done a terrific job of working with the Ukrainian military to modernize the military, to ensure there is more transparency, civilian control, and to be sure they are following the model that will allow them to be successful in recruiting and in fighting against the Russian threat. There is a lot to like in the NDAA, and I have introduced some amendments that I hope will be included as well. I will continue to advocate for Ohio and for the men and women who keep us safe every day. I look forward to voting on the bill's passage in the Senate soon so that our troops, who give so much of themselves just to be able to keep us safe, have the resources they need, the best equipment, and the highest level of readiness to be able to fulfill that mission to keep the peace and to continue to secure our liberties

Mr. PORTMAN

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

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am here to talk about a complicated but really important issue, and it is one that Congress and the administration needs to address before it results in a devastating financial impact on millions of retirees, raises costs to thousands of businesses, some of which are going to go insolvent--bankrupt--unless it is dealt with, and an issue that can harm the overall economy if it is not dealt with. The Presiding Officer has been very involved in this issue, and I hope others will bear with me as we talk about it, because it is complicated, but it is really important. I am talking about multiemployer pension reform, and as anyone who is working on this problem can tell you, it is something that we cannot ignore. Briefly, a multiemployer pension plan consists of multiple different companies. Usually, employees in a single union pool their assets together, and they provide a defined benefit pension--the old-style pensions, a guaranteed pension, so-called--to cover workers and retirees. These plans are jointly administered, then, between the unions and the employers as trustees, who determine the benefits and the employer contributions based on the collective bargaining process and subject to whatever statutory funding requirements there are that we provide here in the U.S. Congress and through law. It is a system of a lot of different employers coming together and providing a pension under one union typically. This system now comprises over 1,400 plans covering 10.8 million participants and their families. Unfortunately, it is on the verge of collapse. The system is underfunded by more than $638 billion, and that figure has probably increased significantly due to the coronavirus epidemic and the resulting impact on the economy. On top of that, there is the Federal entity that ensures these pensions. Pensions are sort of a guaranteed benefit, so-called, but they are guaranteed in a sense because they are insured by a Federal entity called the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. That PBGC for the multiemployer program is projected to become insolvent in less than 5 years. Over 1.4 million workers and retirees are in plans already in what is called ``critical and declining status,'' meaning they are facing benefit cuts of over 90 percent. So that is the problem. This chart can sort of show it to you here. These are the assets at the start of the year--2019, 2020, 2021--and this is what happens. The assets go down. The liabilities go up. This is the financial assistance provided to the various plans. So, as you can see, the green is only going to last until 2025. And, again, with the new economic numbers, that will be exhausted even before that, which creates a real problem for those plan participants or retirees, for the companies that are going to have huge new liabilities--and some of them will not be able to handle it and will not be able to stay in business--and for our economy, because that will then have a contagion impact on the entire economy. So those workers who are expecting to have the benefit because they are still working and those retirees who are facing these cuts are looking to us to come up with a bipartisan solution to address this crisis that faces the multiemployer pension system and the PBGC. They are counting on us to put in place commonsense reforms to ensure that these hard-earned pension benefits will be there for workers and retirees during their retirement. A lot of these workers will tell you that they didn't take the pay increases or they didn't take the healthcare benefits the size they wanted in their collective bargaining because they bargained for this, which was the hope of having a pension--a guaranteed, defined benefit pension--and now they are seeing the possibility that that could result in a 90-percent cut in their benefits. Over the past several years we have been working on this, I have been involved with it. I have been working on the Finance Committee, which is the committee here in the Senate that has responsibility for this issue. In 2018--so going back 2 years ago now--I was participating in hearings as a member of the Joint Select Committee on Solvency of Multiemployer Pension Plans. It was a 1-year committee. It was House and Senate, Republican and Democrat. We were supposed to get to a solution for this problem before it gets worse, and we spent countless hours trying to do that. I spent countless hours in meetings with beneficiaries, retirees, spouses of theirs. Ohio was one of the States hardest hit. I have heard their stories about how years of mismanaged pension plans have put them on the hook for unthinkable cuts in the pensions they just assumed were going to be there. Let me spell out how precarious this is for my home State of Ohio. We have over 60,000 active workers and retirees in multiemployer pension plans at immediate risk of becoming insolvent--probably more than any other State in the country. Many of these Ohio plans have already been forced to drastically reduce benefits, by the way, including the Iron Workers Local 17 Plan in Cleveland, the Southwest Ohio Regional Council of Carpenters Pension Plan, and the Toledo Roofers Local 134 Pension Plan. Some are already insolvent, like the Teamsters Local 116 of Cleveland Pension Fund, so for some, unfortunately, this insolvency has already happened. The Central States Pension Fund, which is the single largest plan that is in this critical and declining status, is projected to become insolvent in 2025--the same time the PBGC is because when it goes under, PBGC goes under; it is that big. They have 44,000 participants in that plan in Ohio--again, more than any other State. The majority of Central States' retirees are veterans, by the way, according to the National United Committee to Protect Pensions. They receive about $360 million in annual benefits from their pensions. By the way, that money goes right back into the economy. They spend it. Unfortunately, years of bad Federal policy with respect to funding and withdrawal liability rules, losses on risky investments, and failure to take proactive action have brought many of these pension plans to the brink of insolvency. The result is that these hard-working Ohioans in Central States face pension cuts of over 90 percent if no action is taken. That is unacceptable. We can't let that happen. By the way, it is not just a retirement security issue, as I said earlier; it is a jobs issue. The multiemployer pension system consists primarily of smaller businesses that face uncertainty and a higher cost of doing business due to the liability they will face called withdrawal liability. More than 200 small businesses are in Central States alone in my home State of Ohio--200 businesses that face huge withdrawal liabilities, many of which are much bigger than the book value of the company, meaning, of course, that they are not going to make it. In fact, if a systemically important plan like Central States were to become insolvent, contributing employers face the risk of being assessed unplanned withdrawal liabilities that will result in a wave of bankruptcies and a contagion effect across the economy as plans with overlapping contribution bases also fail. It will not just be that plan; it will be other plans as well because the companies pay into different plans. Even if they are not assessed withdrawal liability, employers will be forced then to make contributions into an insolvent plan, making those companies not competitive in the labor market. They will not be able to pay their employees as much because they are making the payments into the insolvent plans. These jobs are essential to our economy--right now, more than ever. Many of the current workers in the Central States Pension Fund, as an example, are truckdrivers, and these are the very truckdrivers who are keeping our grocery stores stocked. They are the supply lines running through this coronavirus crisis. They have put their health on the line for all of us, and we need to do our very best to ensure that the pensions they have earned--rightly earned--will be there for them. While these problems were well known before the current economic downturn, this slowdown is only going to accelerate the crisis. As CBO projected in late April--that is, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office--the second quarter of this fiscal year is projected to mark the largest percentage drop in economic output in recorded history, with the GDP projected to fall 40 percent on an annualized basis. That has a real impact on these pensions. As chair of the Senate Finance subcommittee with jurisdiction over these multiemployer pension plans, I have been working on this issue with Democrats and Republicans alike, and I believe a balanced, pro- growth solution to the problem is possible. I also know that it is needed. As bad as the pension crisis is for these retirees we talked about and for their individual plans, it also has a broader impact on our economy, so all of us should be interested in solving this problem. It will not be easy, especially given the unprecedented health crisis we now face, but putting off this difficult work today means greater costs tomorrow. The costs compound, so it gets worse. The multiemployer program deficit is projected to rise significantly if we wait until this period--around 2024 or 2025. Even if we didn't have this pandemic, this is an issue we owe to our constituents to take proactive action on. We have come some way on this project, and we have made some progress over time. In 2018, Senator Sherrod Brown and his co-chair Senator Orrin Hatch and I put together a framework for reform while serving on this Joint Select Committee on Solvency of Multiemployer Pension Plans. I think that framework can effectively address the crisis. We called it the bipartisan framework. It would have provided PBGC enough resources to prevent its own insolvency and put in place structural reforms to the funding rules and the way plans are governed to ensure a long-term solution going forward. Unfortunately, the joint committee was not able to reach final agreement on these reforms, and therefore we weren't able to stabilize the PBGC and put it on a stronger financial footing. But I strongly believe that the mechanism to address the immediate crisis that is in this bipartisan framework still offers the right way forward for us to get this done. In fact, I am pleased there is a renewed interest in addressing this crisis using this framework right now. The House-passed HEROES Act--that is, the legislation the House passed to deal with the COVID-19 crisis--includes a proposal to try to fix this problem. Again, it is a step in the right direction in that they have chosen to adopt the approach of partitioning at-risk plans to help address the immediate crisis. That is the approach we took. This is a step away from their previous plan in the House and among a lot of Democrats in the Senate, which employed a loan structure for all inactive liabilities and, based on CBO analysis, would not have prevented PBGC from becoming insolvent. So this new structure makes more sense, and it is closer to the Senate bipartisan framework. The new House plan, therefore, costs a little less, and retirees also get more certainty from it. There are some flaws in the House Democrats' approach that still make it a nonstarter over here in the Senate. First, there is no shared responsibility when it comes to strengthening the financial condition of the PBGC. It entirely relies on taxpayers--so $59 billion of taxpayer funds over the next 10 years. Some on our side of the aisle, of course, find that to be a bailout by the taxpayers when, in fact, there ought to be more shared responsibility. This is particularly important now as there is more and more concern about the public money that is being spent. Second, the House proposal includes no structural reforms whatsoever to the rules governing how multiemployer pension plans operate, how employer contributions are determined, and corrective actions that trustees can take to improve plan solvency and protect the participants. What we don't want to do is solve the problem with a bandaid and then have the problem come right back again. We want to get this right. The reforms have to address the underlying flaws in the system and ensure that PBGC can function as a self-sustaining entity rather than a new line item in the Federal budget funded by permanent entitlement spending. This has to be something that solves the program long term. We can't put in place a partial solution that will require Congress to come back again and again in the future. Unfortunately, the House Democrats' plan fails to achieve this. In my view, any plan we make to reform the multiemployer pension system has to adhere to three main principles: No. 1, we do need shared responsibility to address the immediate crisis. We should not pass a legislative solution where the bill is entirely footed by taxpayers. Employers and participants must share the responsibility of fixing this problem--not taxpayers alone since 99 percent of taxpayers aren't participating in this system. A recent poll by McLaughlin & Associates of 2,700 likely voters in Midwestern States found that 76 percent of voters support a shared solution based on a combination of financial contributions from employers, retirees, and taxpayers. A Congressional Budget Office 2017 working group paper found that both various exemptions from government employer contributions and accounting standards used by multiemployer plans played significant roles in allowing PBGC to become insolvent. So both exemptions from the employers putting money in and the accounting standards are the reason, they say, that PBGC became underfunded. So greater employer contributions are part of getting these plans back on track. Second, I believe any solution must ensure sustainable solvency for the PBGC. Again, this is important to be sure that we are solving this problem. Overall, I believe premiums should be a significant contributor to the health of PBGC, covering at least half of the cost of recapitalization. We also need our plan participants to pitch in, in the form of solvency fees paid directly to PBGC. With a significant variable-rate premium, by the way, we can make these solvency fees as low as 10 percent or maybe even lower. We need to think long and hard about the levels of shared responsibility that could include premiums imposed on workers, on unions, and increased flat-rate premiums as well. These would be small contributions but significant in the sense that everybody would be participating, everybody would do a little bit, and the taxpayers would be asked to do a lot too. But the only way we can get the taxpayers to make a substantial contribution is to ensure that there is this shared responsibility. Third, any solution must ensure there is sustainable solvency for the multiemployer plans in the future. Any bipartisan solution should include structural reform to the funding rules governing employer contributions to multiemployer plans so that Congress and the Treasury will not be regularly called upon to bail out a large number of underfunded plans. Retirees need to know these plans are secure. This includes gradually phasing down the rate at which plans may value existing pension liabilities, which are promises to retirees that should be kept but are being budgeted for through investments that the Congressional Budget Office says are high risk. Without any rules on how these pension liabilities are valued, there is high risk. Here is what the risk is now. Here is the average multiemployer plan target rate of return. Here is a conservative way to look at it, which would be the interest rate on 10-year Treasuries. By the way, the 10-year Treasury is now down to just about 1 percent, so it has gone down even further. This gap is that high risk the Congressional Budget Office is talking about. So there needs to be some solution here. I understand that this needs to be phased in. It needs to be gradual. It needs to be reasonable. But we have to, again, ensure that retirees know that, when they get into a plan and make contributions to a plan, it is going to be there for them. The Senate Finance Committee published its own proposal in November which attempted to get at these two goals of addressing the immediate crisis through shared responsibility and preventing a future crisis through reforms to the funding rules. This was a Republican plan put forward by Senator Grassley, who spoke moments ago. That proposal was called the Multiemployer Pension Recapitalization Reform Plan. It is not perfect, but it is worth emphasizing that the Trump administration supports this proposal and put out a Statement of Administration Policy endorsing it, saying: ``We believe it has the potential to serve as the base for a long-term solution to the multiemployer pension crisis.'' I have talked to several people within the administration, and I think they are also committed to a bipartisan agreement in this Congress to try to solve this problem. Again, the plan put out by Senator Grassley and also Senator Alexander may not be perfect, but now you have two plans out there, both of which use the same basic structure, and I think there is an opportunity here for us to come together. Right now, I know some of my counterparts in the House who have worked on the multiemployer pension proposal in the HEROES Act want to know whom they should be negotiating with because they are not negotiating right now on how to find that compromise. I would suggest talking to the Finance Committee. That is where the jurisdiction is. That is what the administration has indicated as well. We have been working all year with the PBGC on a reasonable proposal that we believe can get support from the National United Committee to Protect Pensions, many of the Teamsters local unions, and many employers who are trying to stay afloat right now. The Senate Finance Committee will continue to reach out to have a serious conversation with Democrats on both sides of the Capitol to help address this immediate crisis and ensure sustainable solvency for the multiemployer pension system. In order to reach an agreement on this issue, shared responsibility will be necessary to make it work, in my view. To reiterate, we are willing to put serious Federal money on the table--taxpayer funds--and we are willing to negotiate, but it has to be a balanced approach. The time to act is now. The Senate Finance Committee has this commonsense proposal on the Republican side--again, vetted by PBGC-- that, while not perfect, is an interesting starting point for us to come together. The House has their own proposal that has many similarities in terms of its structure. So let's build upon those, as Republicans and Democrats, to ensure we can get our multiemployer pension system back in working order. We owe it to the retirees. We owe it to the workers, to the participants in these plans. We owe it to these small businesses. Let's get serious about this and ensure we can protect the retirements of hard-working Americans we represent. Taxpayers deserve proactive action now, and so do workers and so do retirees. Let's get it done. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, today I rise to ask unanimous consent to pass S. Res. 623, which is a resolution commemorating Otto Fredrick Warmbier and condemning the North Korean regime for their continued human rights abuses. Otto Warmbier was a native of my hometown of Cincinnati, OH. He was also a young man of great spirit, intellect, and promise. He attended the University of Virginia, and in 2015, he flew to North Korea on a cultural trip. He went with a tour group. At the end of his brief visit there, he was unjustly arrested by North Korean security officials at the airport, as he was departing, and he was imprisoned for 17 months on trumped-up charges relating to a political poster. During his captivity, he was badly mistreated and was returned to the United States on June 13, 2017, only after falling into a comatose state. He never recovered. Otto died on June 19, 2017--6 days later and 3 years ago tomorrow. Senator Brown from Ohio and I have introduced this resolution to remember what happened to him, to keep the memory of Otto, alive, and to hold the North Korean regime accountable for their gross mistreatment, their human rights abuses. Many others, in addition to Otto Warmbier, have been subject to those human rights abuses, including the North Korean people, whom they continue to repress, even starve and mistreat. Our resolution calls for the United States to continue to use our voice, including at the United Nations and other forums, to speak out against the human rights abuses of the North Korean Government. It calls for the sanctions enacted under the Otto Warmbier North Korea Nuclear Sanctions and Enforcement Act of 2019 to remain fully implemented. Most importantly, this resolution honors and remembers Otto Warmbier, lest we forget what the North Korean dictatorship did to him. His parents, Fred and Cindy, have channeled their grief into constructive efforts to expose the human rights abuses of the North Korean dictatorship, and I commend them for that. No parent should have to endure what they have gone through. Jane and I plan to visit with them at their home in Cincinnati tomorrow on the third anniversary of Otto's death, and I hope to be able to hand them a copy of this resolution and to be able to say that the entire U.S. Senate voted to approve it. This resolution is the right thing to do, and I encourage my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to pass it by unanimous consent. I yield the floor to my colleague from Ohio.

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, as in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Foreign Relations Committee be discharged from further consideration and that the Senate now proceed to S. Res. 623.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am here on the floor to talk about a significant step forward in holding China accountable for not playing by the rules. Today, after months of work, we are introducing bipartisan legislation called the Safeguarding American Innovation Act that will help crack down on the rampant theft of U.S. taxpayer-funded research and innovation at America's colleges and universities by foreign governments like China. It's outrageous, and it has to stop. At the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which I chair, we conducted a bipartisan year-long investigation in 2019 into how China has used so-called talent recruitment programs, most notably its Thousand Talents Plan, to steal U.S. taxpayer-funded research. The Chinese Communist Party has systematically targeted the most promising U.S. research and researchers, and then paid these grant recipients to take their taxpayer-funded research to China. That research and technology often ends up going directly to China to help fuel the rise of its military and economy. Part of the reason it's gone on so long, frankly, is because we've been asleep at the switch. That's starting to change in the wake of our Subcommittee investigation. Right now, our law enforcement officials and other federal entities are working to hold China accountable for this IP theft problem but are limited in the actions they can take under current law. All of the arrests they've made so far have been about peripheral financial crimes like wire fraud and tax evasion, not the core issue of taking American taxpayer-paid research to benefit China. Why? Because they don't have the legal ability to address the root causes of this problem. That changes today. Along with my Democratic counterpart on the Subcommittee, Tom Carper from Delaware, we are introducing the bipartisan Safeguarding American Innovation Act to empower the government to protect our research enterprise while keeping it open and transparent. First, our bill makes it a crime failing to disclose their foreign ties on federal grant applications, which, shockingly, it currently isn't. It requires the Office of Management and Budget, OMB, to streamline and coordinate grant-making between the federal agencies so there's needed accountability and transparency when it comes to tracking the billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded grant money that's being distributed. It also allows the State Department to deny visas to foreign researchers who we know are seeking to steal research and IP by exploiting exemptions in our export control laws. This may surprise you, but the State Department can't do that now. Career foreign service officers, employees at the State Department, have asked us to provide this authority. Our bill also requires research institutions and universities to provide the State Department basic information about the sensitive technologies that a foreign researcher will have access to. And our bill ensures transparency by requiring universities to report any foreign gift of $50,000 or more and empowering the Department of Education to fine universities that repeatedly fail to disclose these gifts. Rather than just pointing the finger at China, we ought to be looking at our own government and our own institutions and doing a better job here. Until we start to get our own house in order and take a firmer stance on foreign influence here in this country, we're not going to see much improvement. That's what this legislation does. In turn, I think showing that we're serious about fixing our own vulnerabilities will send a firm but fair signal to China--and other adversaries looking to take advantage of our research enterprise--to change their behavior. I encourage my colleagues to support this bipartisan effort. I yield back.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I now ask for a second reading, and in order to place the bill on the calendar under the provisions of rule XIV, I object to my own request.

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I understand there is a bill at the desk, and I ask for its first reading.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am here on the floor this evening to talk about China and to talk about how we can have a better relationship with China, one that is fair and equitable. I am going to talk specifically about some of the investigations and reports that we have worked on here in the U.S. Congress over the past couple of years. I am going to be talking about four specific reports that came out of what is called the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. I chair that subcommittee. It is under the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and it is a committee that takes these investigations seriously. We do a fair, objective, thorough job. All of our investigations are bipartisan. I am going to talk a little about why these investigations that we have done have led me to the conclusion that we need to do much more here in this country to be able to respond to China and to be able to have the kind of fair and equitable relationship that we should all desire. A lot of China's critics talk about the fact that China needs to do things differently, and I don't disagree with most of that, but the reality is there is much we can do right here in this country to create a situation in which we do not have the issues that I will talk about tonight--some of the unfair activities that have occurred here in this country. Frankly, I think we have been naive and not properly prepared. I will also talk about some legislation that we are proposing tomorrow morning, which will focus on how to make America more effective at pushing back against a specific threat to our research and our intellectual property. Our goal is not to have China as an enemy. Our goal is to actually have China as a strategic partner, wherein there is a fair and equitable and sustainable relationship, but it is going to require some changes. Again, I am going to focus tonight on some changes we need to make right here, changes that are within our control. Our investigations have been thorough--in fact, driven--and our reports have been objective, bipartisan, and eye-opening, and I encourage you to go on the PSI website--psi.gov--and check it out. Our first report was in February of 2019. It detailed a lack of transparency and reciprocity, among other concerns, with the Confucius Institutes that China operates here in this country. These Confucius Institutes are at our colleges and universities. Some people are aware of that, but some may not be aware that they are also at our elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools. Our reports show how these Confucius Institutes have been a tool to stifle academic freedom where they are located, toeing the Chinese Communist Party line on sensitive issues like Tibet or Taiwan or the Uighurs or Tiananmen Square. By the way, when I talk about China tonight, I hope people realize I am not talking about the Chinese people. I am talking about the Chinese Government; therefore, I am talking about the Chinese Communist Party. With regard to the Confucius Institutes, for example, which are spread around this country, ultimately, they report to a branch of the Chinese Government that is involved with spreading positive propaganda about China. Ultimately, it is controlled by whom? The Chinese Communist Party. So I hope the comments I make tonight will not be viewed as comments that are regarding the Chinese people as much as a small group in China, the Chinese Communist Party, that, with regard to the Confucius Institutes and other approaches it has taken to the United States, have led to these issues. By the way, it is thanks to our report and to the broader scrutiny that followed that we learned about the lack of academic freedom and about the fact that history is being taught a certain way at the Confucius Institutes. By the way, it also pointed out that the Chinese language is taught. It is a good thing to have this intercultural dialogue and the opportunity to learn more about China, but there needs to be, again, an understanding and a history of China that is fair and honest, which does include discussions of what happened in Tiananmen Square or what is happening today with regard to the Uighurs--a minority group in China that is being oppressed. In the year that followed our scrutiny--so, really, in the last year and a few months--23 of the, roughly, 100 Confucius Institutes on college campuses in America have closed, and others have made some positive changes as to how they operate. So I believe our report made a significant difference in terms of how we relate to the Confucius Institutes. I said earlier that one of my concerns about the Confucius Institutes was the lack of reciprocity. When our State Department has attempted to set up something comparable on Chinese university campuses, it has been unable to do so. In fact, whereas the Confucius Institute employees and members of the Chinese Government are able to come on our college campuses, we are told that U.S. Government officials and, for that matter, private citizens cannot go on Chinese campuses without having a minder, somebody to be there to monitor what they are doing. Sometimes they are not permitted to go at all, which goes to the lack of reciprocity. Yet my goal, really, is to, again, talk about what we can do here. I would urge those tonight who are watching and who are connected with a college or a university that still has a Confucius Institute--or a high school or a middle school or an elementary school--to check it out. Check out our report in which we have many instances when the American students who are learning there are not getting the full story. That may not be true in the case of all Confucius Institutes, but I would recommend that you do the research yourself. Then, in March of 2019, after the Confucius Institute report, our report into the Equifax data breach here in America showed how China had targeted private U.S. companies and stolen the information of millions of Americans. In the Equifax data breach of 2017, which we studied and which is one of the largest in history, the personal information of 147 million Americans was stolen by IP addresses that originated in China. So we should just be aware of that, and we should take precautions and protections and encryptions and security measures here to avoid it. Again, this is about our doing more here in this country to be prepared for the reality of the 21st century. Then, in November of last year, we released another eye-opening report, this one detailing the rampant theft of U.S. taxpayer-funded research and intellectual property by China by way of its so-called talent recruitment programs--meaning, China systematically finds promising researchers who are doing work on research that China is interested in, and China recruits them. These programs have not been subtle. The Thousand Talents Plan is the most understood of these programs, although there are a couple hundred others. Yet we showed, in studying the Thousand Talents Plan, how this problem has been ongoing for two decades in this country. Through this program, much of what China has taken from our labs and then taken to China has gone directly toward fueling the rise of the Chinese economy and the Chinese military. Again, this is about China, but it is really about us. How have we let this happen? Specifically, we found that the Chinese Government has targeted this promising, U.S.-based research and its researchers. Often, this research is funded by U.S. taxpayers. As taxpayers, we spend $115 million a year on research to places like the National Institutes of Health or to the National Science Foundation or to the Department of Energy for basic science research. It has been a good investment because, through some of these investments, we have discovered cures to particular kinds of cancer and technologies that have helped our military, but it is not good if the U.S. taxpayer is paying for this research and then China is taking it. China has not just taken some of this research funded by U.S. taxpayers but has paid these grant recipients to take their research over to the Chinese universities in China--again, universities that are affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party. This is not about the people of China. This is about the Chinese Communist Party, and it has been very clever. It wants to make sure that China is a stronger competitor against us, so it literally takes the research from the United States to a lab in China where it tries to replicate the research and provide the money to these researchers. Just last week, we released a fourth PSI report that showed that this problem of China's not playing by the rules extends to the telecommunications space as well. Let me explain that situation. Then I will go back to the Thousand Talents Program. You may remember that, in May of last year, the FCC prohibited a company called China Mobile and its U.S. subsidiary from providing telecom services from the United States on the grounds that doing so would jeopardize our national security--the first time such a ruling had been issued. The fact that this was only the first time that a foreign telecommunications company had been denied approval to operate in the U.S. on national security grounds prompted us to investigate other Chinese state-owned carriers that were already authorized to operate in the United States. We asked an important question: Why was China Mobile USA any different than these other three Chinese companies? We discovered in our report, which again we issued just a month ago, that it wasn't different. We conducted a yearlong investigation into the government processes for reviewing, approving, and monitoring Chinese state-owned telecommunications firms operating here in the United States, and we found, once again, over the years, the Federal Government had been lax when it comes to securing our telecommunications networks against risks posed by Chinese state-owned carriers. Again, it is what we can do here in this country that we haven't done. In fact, three Chinese state-owned carriers have been operating in the U.S. for nearly 20 years, but it has only been in recent years that the FCC, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security have focused on the potential risks these firms bring when they operate in the United States. What we didn't know 20 years ago, we do know today, and we should use that information to protect ourselves. We now know that the Chinese Government views telecommunications as a strategic industry and has expended significant resources to create and promote new business opportunities for its state-owned carriers. We also learned in our investigation and said in our report that Chinese state-owned telecommunications carriers are ``subject to exploitation, influence, and control by the Chinese government'' and can be used in the Chinese government's cyber and economic espionage efforts aimed at the United States. This isn't a surprise. We have seen this time and time again that the Chinese Government targets the United States through cyber and economic espionage activities and enlists its state-owned entities in these efforts. The Chinese telecommunications firms have been part of our U.S. telecommunications industry as a result, and, of course, that is critical to our everyday life. Its services from cellular networks to broadband internet connections help break down barriers between people, nations, and continents. That is good. It has helped our economy and the economies of many other countries grow immensely. We all benefit when telecommunications are global. It makes sense then that the Federal Government has tasked the FCC with ensuring that foreign telecommunications can establish a foothold in the United States, but only if it is done in a fair and safe manner. Again, what we have learned is that the FCC and other Federal agencies have been slow to respond to the national security threats these telecom companies can pose in terms of cyber security and economic espionage. As we detail in our report, the FCC, which lacks the national security and law enforcement expertise required to assess these risks, has turned to other executive branch agencies to assess them, specifically the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense, a group commonly known as the Team Telecom. Team Telecom was an informal arrangement and has lacked formal authority to operate, making it overall an ineffective solution to assessing these risks. The informality has resulted in protracted review periods and a process FCC Commissioners have described as broken and an inextricable black hole that provided ``no clarity for the future.'' For example, Team Telecom's review of China Mobile USA's application lasted for 7 years. This points to a troubling trend we have found in all of these reports--how, frankly, our government and our institutions over a space of time, the last couple of decades, have permitted China to take advantage of lax U.S. oversight, be it on our college campuses, our research labs, or in cyberspace. At our PSI hearing on the Thousand Talents report, the FBI witness before us acknowledged as much saying: With our present day knowledge of the threat from Chinese talent plans, we wish we had taken more rapid and comprehensive action in the past. And the time to make up for that is now. That is our own Federal Bureau of Investigation. Again: ``We wish we had taken more rapid and comprehensive action in the past.'' They don't say that often, but it is true, and I commend them for saying it at the hearing and for starting to make up for it now because they have made a number of arrests just in the past few months with regard to the Talents program. It is my hope that PSI's work has opened the eyes of our government to these systemic problems, and I think that is the case, as what we have seen in the Trump administration is they have taken a firmer stance towards the Chinese Government in every one of the four areas I talked about. As PSI was nearing the end of its telecom investigation, for example, the responsible Federal agencies announced that they would review whether these Chinese state-owned carriers that we were studying should continue to operate in the U.S., given the national security threats. The Trump administration also recently issued an Executive order to establish Team Telecom as a formal committee, which is a good idea, as well as addressing many of the issues the subcommittee report identified in Team Telecom's processes. Again, these are good steps, and I am pleased to say that they were prompted by the thorough and, again, objective, nonpartisan inquiry that we made through PSI. These four investigations combined show us that China, frankly--and, again, the Chinese Government and the Chinese Communist Party, not the people of China--is not going to play by the rules unless we require it. Until we start to clean up our own house and take a firmer stance on foreign influence here in this country, we are not going to see much improvement. Rather than pointing the finger at China, we ought to be looking at our own government and our own institutions and doing a better job here. Along those lines, I found it interesting that, just last week, 54 NIH-funded researchers nationwide have resigned or have been fired because they had been found to be hiding their ties to foreign research institutions as part of an NIH investigation into this problem. Again, after our PSI investigation talking about how the Thousand Talents program and other programs work, there are now 54 people just last week who have been fired or have resigned. Of the cases NIH has studied, 70 percent of the researchers failed to disclose foreign grant funding, while more than half failed to disclose participation in a foreign talent program like Thousand Talents. By the way, the FBI just recently warned universities across the country that China may be attempting to steal our research on the coronavirus-- therapies, antiviral therapies, vaccines, other research. This problem is ongoing. I think, in a fair and straightforward manner, we have got to insist that there be a level playing field. We have got to insist that there be fairness and accountability, again, in an objective manner and a straightforward manner. At the same time, our law enforcement officials and other Federal entities that are working to hold China accountable are limited in the actions they can take. That is part of cleaning up our own house. We need to make some changes around here, including in our laws, which has to come through this body. In the case of the Thousand Talents plan, we have seen first-ever arrests related to Thousand Talents recently. They followed our investigation, our report, and our hearings. We even saw it in my home State of Ohio. All of the arrests in connection with the Thousand Talents plan, by the way, had been related to peripheral financial crimes, like wire fraud and tax evasion--not the core issue of a conflict of commitment, the taking of American taxpayer-paid research. Why? Because amazingly, it is not currently a crime to fail to disclose foreign funding of the same research on Federal grant applications. In other words, if you are doing research and paid by the taxpayer of the United States in your research and also being paid by China to do the same research and to have the research go to China, you don't have to disclose that under law. These arrests that have been made haven't been about that core issue. They have been about other things like tax evasion or wire fraud, kind of like they went after the gangsters in the old days on tax evasion because they couldn't get them on a RICO statute. We need to change the laws so that we can give our law enforcement community the tools they need to be able to do the job that all of us expect is being done. It is incumbent upon Congress to work in a bipartisan manner to pass those laws and to put a stop to this behavior. This shouldn't be a partisan issue, and it isn't. It is about defending the interests of the United States, and that is something we should all agree on. The good news is we are starting to do just that. Tomorrow, we plan to introduce bipartisan legislation called the Safeguarding American Innovation Act based on recommendations from our Thousand Talents report from late last year to protect U.S. taxpayer- funded research. First and foremost, our bill is going to help the Department of Justice go after Thousand Talents participants by holding them accountable for failing to disclose their foreign ties on Federal grant applications. Again, it is a tool that they desperately need. Our bill goes directly to the root of the problem. It makes it punishable by law to knowingly fail to disclose foreign funding on Federal grant applications This isn't about more arrests. We should all agree that transparency and honesty on grant applications are critical to the integrity of U.S. research and the U.S. research enterprise. These provisions will help promote those principles as well. Our bill also makes other important changes from our report. It requires the Office of Management and Budget, OMB, to streamline and coordinate grant making between the Federal agencies so there is more continuity and accountability in coordination when it comes to tracking the billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded grant money that is being distributed. This kind of transparency is long overdue. We have worked closely with the National Science Foundation, with the National Institutes of Health, with the Department of Energy, and others on this legislation, and they agree this is very important. Our legislation also allows the State Department to deny visas to foreign researchers who they know are seeking to steal research and intellectual property by exploiting exemptions in our current export control laws. This may surprise you, but the State Department can't do that now. Career Foreign Service Officers and employees at the State Department have asked us to please provide them this authority. They testified before our hearing, asking us to help them to be able to do what they know needs to be done. Our bill also requires research institutions and universities to provide the State Department basic information about sensitive technologies that a foreign researcher would have access to. Providing this information as part of the visa process should help streamline the process for the State Department and for the research institutions. This allows for college campuses to rely on the State Department to do some of the vetting for these applicants and to help keep bad actors off the campus. This is why many research institutions and universities will be endorsing our legislation tomorrow because we have worked with them on this issue and others, including new transparency standards for universities. They are now going to be required to report any foreign gift of $50,000 or more, which is a lower level from the current threshold of $250,000, but it is also going to empower the Department of Education to work with these universities and research institutions to ensure that this can be complied with in a way that doesn't create undue redtape and expenditures. It also allows DOE to fine universities that repeatedly fail to disclose these gifts. I believe this legislation can be a model going forward as to how we use the lessons we have learned from these, again, objective and straightforward PSI reports to get to the root causes of these cases. We have gotten widespread support across my home State of Ohio, from research leaders, hospitals, colleges and universities, and other stakeholders who want to see us continue to have an open and transparent research system and have the United States be the center in the globe for innovation and research, but to ensure that can continue to happen, they want to be sure we are holding China accountable. We are now at work on this legislation to codify into law some of the steps taken by the Trump administration in response to our new telecommunications PSI report as well. This legislation we will introduce tomorrow will be led by myself and Senator Tom Carper, my colleague from the other side of the aisle from Delaware, who was also my partner on this report with regard to the Thousand Talents program and the hearing. We also have five other Democrats who will be joining us tomorrow, all of whom have an interest and understanding of this complicated issue. We will also have about an equal number of Republicans joining us, probably six to eight Republicans. So, again, this is going to be a bipartisan effort--I would say even a nonpartisan effort--to ensure that, in a smart, sensible, practical way, we can respond to the threat that we are facing, in this case, from China taking our intellectual property, our innovations, our ideas, and taking them to China and using them in China, sometimes against the United States. In addition to the four examples we discussed tonight, the subcommittee will continue its work to shine a light on other examples where China and other countries aren't living by the rules, so we can ensure that, with regard to China and in regard to other foreign governments, we can create a more durable and a more equitable and a more sustainable relationship between our countries. Again, we don't want to be enemies with China, but what we do want is to have a relationship with mutual respect. When we have the right to ask them that they treat us with the same respect that we treat them, at the end of the day, that is what is going to be best for the Chinese people, best for the American people, and best for all of us moving forward. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to legislative session for a period of morning business with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it stand adjourned under the previous order, following the remarks of Senator Blumenthal.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 10 a.m., Thursday, June 18; further, that following the prayer and the pledge, the morning hour be deemed expired, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and morning business be closed; further, that following leader remarks, the Senate proceed to executive session to resume consideration of the Walker nomination; finally, notwithstanding rule XXII, postcloture time on the Walker nomination expire at 1:30 p.m.

Mr. PORTMAN

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

Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I am here on the floor today to talk about the legislation that is before the Senate, which is a great opportunity to help our national parks. The bill does a number of things that people have heard about to help with regard to our public lands, with regard to fishing access, and with regard to community parks. Yet one thing it does that is absolutely essential is it included the Restore Our Parks Act. That is legislation which is necessary right now to fix our national parks. I say fix our national parks--they are our treasure. When people are asked about the national parks, they usually use that word. It is a treasure. It is a great asset of the United States. I think Ken Burns said it is ``America's best idea.'' He did a great documentary on the parks, by the way. The point is, our national parks are spectacular. They are majestic. They tell the history of our country. There are so many good things about them. The problem is that right now, our parks are under a huge backlog of maintenance projects--$12.5 billion. That is way more than the parks' budget. They just can't get out from under it. It has been happening for years and years and years. Think about people going back to our parks this summer after the coronavirus hopefully gets better and people are able to go to these reopened parks. We will probably have huge attendance. When they get there, they will find out that a trail is closed because of erosion, or the bathroom doesn't work because the bathroom has deteriorated, or they can't go to the visitors center because the ceiling has been leaking, which caused mold on the walls, which caused the floors to buckle, or the highways and bridges are crumbling. This is what is happening in our national parks. As Members of Congress, we asked them to give us a full list over the last few years of this because we keep hearing about this, and they have. They have talked about $6.5 million of high-priority projects and about $6 billion of priority projects, and the list continues to grow. By the way, the costs continue to compound. In other words, they get worse and worse every year. Just think about your own home. If you don't fix the leaky roof I have talked about, you will have all these other problems. If you can get to it and fix it when it happens, you will have much lower costs. All of us as taxpayers should want to fix this maintenance backlog and be able to say that not only are these parks a treasure, but these parks are open, everything is open, and we can do a better job in stewardship. This legislation does that. Not a penny of the funding, by the way, can go toward expansion of the parks. I have heard that from some of my colleagues--well, you all keep putting money into expanding the parks. No, that is not what this is about. This is about stewardship. This is about ensuring that we take better care of what we have. I can't think of a more fiscally conservative idea than that. I think it is important for us to realize that this legislation before us is not about expanding anything; it is about taking better care of what we have. The annual appropriations from Congress to the parks funds the rangers, the nature programs, and the basics to continue to operate the parks. They do not fund these maintenance backlog problems or these big projects. We have been ignoring them for decades, by the way. This is not new. It has built up and is getting worse and worse as the costs compound. Let me give an example. Cuyahoga Valley National Park is in Ohio. We love Cuyahoga Valley. It is the 13th most visited national park in the country. You may never have heard of it, but if you are in the Akron- Cleveland area, I hope you go. It is spectacular. Guess what. They have a maintenance backlog of just over $50 million. Their annual budget from the Park Service is $11 million. That covers everything. That operates the entire park--the 13th most visited park in America. It is a beautiful park that extends basically from Cleveland to Akron. It is beautiful along the Cuyahoga River. It is beautiful. It has a tourism train that goes through it, a single-track, narrow-gauge train. It is just a great place. The train tracks are falling apart. That is a huge expense that can't come out of this annual budget because you have to replace the ties and so on. There is a bridge that I saw that is crumbling. It is not going to be able to be used soon by bicyclists or hikers to go over the river because it is falling apart. That bridge is a capital expense. It takes a lot of funding to do that and to do it right. So the legislation before us says: Let's take this on. Let's get started on getting this backlog behind us so that we can focus on having the most majestic and the most beautiful parks in the world here that we can continue to be proud of. The way we do it is really interesting. We say, OK, we are going to continue to have the annual appropriations, and we are going to properly fund the parks that way, but for these backlog problems, we are going to take funding from offshore and onshore oil and gas and other energy projects that are currently going directly into the government, and we are going to take no more than half of that funding that is unobligated--in other words, not obligated to any other purpose--and we are going to say: Let's use that funding, up to a cap every year, to reduce about half the backlog over the next 5 years. It is the priority projects I talked about, the $6.5 billion. To me, this makes all the sense in the world. Again, it is going to save us money over time--assuming we want our parks to be working, we want the trails to be open, we want the business centers to be open, which of course we do and we must. Our parks are more visited than ever, and it is important that we have parks that are ready, particularly when people start to go back to the parks this summer. Some of my colleagues have come to the floor and said: Well, isn't there another way to do this? I mean, I wish there were, but this is a pretty good funding source. For those who say it is not paid for, well, I am telling you what the funding source is. Is it is the royalties that come off of these energy projects. By the way, this is for a good conservation cause and a good fiscally conservative cause--to get these long-term maintenance problems under control so that they don't continue to grow and grow and grow. I first started on the project over 13 years ago, which is why it is kind of exciting for me that is finally coming, I hope, to fruition here in the Senate, at least. I was the OMB Director for George W. Bush--the Office of Management and Budget--and in our budget in 2007, we put in place a centennial project for the parks. The Park Service celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2016, and building up to that, we wanted to deal with this long-term maintenance backlog and provide some more funding for the parks. I worked with the Secretary of the Interior at the time--this was, again, the George W. Bush administration, a Republican administration. I worked with Democrats here on the Hill. We worked with all the outside groups concerned about the parks and came up with a creative way to get public-private partnership money in it to provide more funding for this long-term maintenance problem. We were not successful in getting Congress to take it up and to appropriate those funds at the time, but I continued working on this. A couple years later when I was asked to serve on the centennial commission on the parks--I was not in office at that time. I had left politics--thinking forever--but now I am back here in the Senate. But on the centennial commission, we analyzed what was going on in the parks in connection with the centennial coming up, in 2016, and what was the No. 1 issue? Of course it was this long-term maintenance backlog and how do you deal with it and the great frustration people felt because we just couldn't get on top of it. So I have been at this for some time. Again, I see that some of my colleagues are saying there must be other ways to fund this, and some have suggested, well, let's raise some fees. Well, I am the author of the Centennial Act, which was passed about 3 years ago--on the last day, practically, of session in 2016. That legislation actually took the senior fee, which is the lifetime senior pass, and increased it, actually quadrupled it, to provide more funding for this very purpose and other purposes at the parks. That was not without controversy. I can show you some of the letters and emails that I got and some of the phone calls that we received with regard to increasing the senior pass. But we did it for the right reasons--because we thought the senior pass was a relatively good deal--which it still is, by the way. It is a tremendous deal for our seniors. But we decided we were going to take some heat on this in order to provide more revenue for the park because we were so frustrated because we couldn't find other sources. I am also the author of the Centennial Challenge as part of that legislation, which allows for the private sector to provide funding to our parks. Again, we did this because we were very interested in finding more funding. The Centennial Challenge Fund is a public-private partnership. It requires that every Federal dollar that goes into the parks be matched at least one-to-one with a private sector dollar. And I have been involved with that. I have been involved in selling that program and encouraging the private sector to do more. Since we passed that in 2008--fiscal year 2008--Congress has provided $129 million in appropriations, which has been leveraged by an additional $167 million in non-Federal funding. In other words, it has been more than one-to-one. There has been more than 1 dollar of private sector funding that has matched the 1 dollar of Federal funding, so that has worked. But, folks, it has its limits. We are talking about $12.5 billion in the backlog, and the numbers I just gave you--we were able to raise $167 million in non-Federal funding. So I would just say to my colleagues who say ``Gosh, why can't you raise fees and so on?''--that has been done. I will say also with regard to fees into some of our parks, it is not very practical. At the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, as an example, there are literally dozens of entrances to the park. I mean, the park is in a suburban area through Akron and Cleveland, that area, and you can get to the park through all sorts of different roads and avenues, and there is no grand entrance to the park. There is a great visitors center, which people are encouraged to go to as they enter the park, but there are bike trails through it, and there is a railroad through it, as I talked about, and there are lots of roads that come into it. So it is not like you are driving into Yellowstone Park and you have to go through a designated entrance. So is there more we can do in some of these areas to provide additional pay-fors to the parks? I am sure there are, and I will continue to work on that, and I will continue to look at ways to do it. But $12.5 billion? It is not going to happen without a lot of controversy. So this is about being sure we are doing what is right for our parks. It is also, though, helpful in terms of jobs, as you can imagine, because these projects are infrastructure. We talk a lot about that around here and, typically we don't even think about paying for it. We just say we are going to do an infrastructure stimulus project, as an example, as was done back in 2008 and 2009. In this case, these are shovel-ready and vetted projects. Again, we have required, as Congress, for the Park Service to tell us what the projects are. So I can give you a list for your State. I have done that with my colleagues--given them the list of what the top priorities are for their States, how much money it is, what the project is, how you do it. You don't have to go and get the permits that you might have to get on non-Federal land because these are on national park property, and they just keep building up, higher and higher, but they are ready. They are ready to go. They are also vetted. They also don't have to go through the same process that some would if they were on non-private land. They create a lot of jobs. We just had a report that has been approved by the Office of Management and Budget that came out of the Park Service showing that the number of jobs that are direct jobs related to this national park restoration act we are voting on today is over 40,000 jobs when you do direct and indirect, including suppliers to these projects. So you have the person who is fixing the bridge I talked about or the railroad tracks, but who provides the material to put in the new railroad ties? It is over 100,000 jobs. So over 100,000 jobs are created just from this legislation. So it is the right thing to do no matter what, but it also happens to be a really opportune time for us to put in place some funding that goes directly into good-paying, high-quality jobs--average pay, $65,000 to $70,000 a year--to be able to help with regard to the post- coronavirus economic downturn we have seen and will see for some time. So this is good legislation for all these reasons There has also been an analysis done recently about what happens if you don't fix these parks and the parks aren't able to open. There is a $41 billion economic benefit for communities around the parks. That is $41 billion a year. Think about that. It supports more than 340,000 jobs. These are not jobs in the parks themselves but surrounding. So these are the restaurants and the hotels and the outfitters and so on. Our national parks are not only a great way for us to help create more jobs with regard to the infrastructure needs that are overwhelming, with good stewardship--not expanding one acre but just taking better care of what we have--but it is also an opportunity for us to help our economy, to help ensure that we are putting people back to work in good-paying jobs, and help ensure that taxpayers aren't going to foot an even higher bill by not taking care of that leaky roof that then causes the mold on the wall that then causes the floor to couple. We are going to get this started. Will there be need for more funding? Absolutely. Again, some of the ideas I have talked to my colleagues about on how to find additional funding, I am all ears. Again, I have done it. I have raised the fees in legislation. I have looked at the private sector, and we brought in over $150 million of private sector money. But this $6.5 billion, which is the amount in this legislation, to deal with the highest priority infrastructure projects and problems at our parks is absolutely essential. Let's not wait any longer. Let's get this done now and ensure we can continue to enjoy not just the beauty and the history of our national parks but also those economic benefits I talked about and do so for generations to come. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Thank you, Senator Heinrich. Thanks to my colleagues for being here. This is an opportunity to do the Land and Water Conservation Fund expansion and provide fishing access through our States and local communities and the parks that they need and want, but it is also an opportunity to fix our parks, and this is desperately needed. Our national parks are in trouble, just as more and more people are returning to our parks for recreation and fishing and all the other access we have. There are 84 million acres of true treasures in America, thanks to Teddy Roosevelt and many others who followed in his footsteps. We preserved this land and protected our history, but there is a $12.5 billion maintenance backlog in our parks. As visitors go to our parks as they reopen this summer, they will find that the trail is closed or the toilet doesn't work or the lodge has a leak in the roof, and therefore they can't use it. When you get a leak in the roof and you get the mold in the walls and the floor, that is what is happening, and we haven't funded it. Part of the reason is it is so expensive. These are infrastructure expenditures that require significant funds. So part of what this legislation does is finally allow us to catch up here in the U.S. Congress. It is a debt unpaid. In other words, we should have been paying all over these many years to ensure this wouldn't happen but, unfortunately, for decades it has. So some of the funds we use here go directly into these parks and also to our Forest Service and wildlife refuges and our lands and our Native American lands. This is to simply stop the erosion, really, of the beauty of our parks and to eliminate this historic level of backlog of maintenance projects. So we appreciate the fact that tonight we have an opportunity to finally begin to change our approach and to switch gears. I want to thank my colleagues on both sides of the aisle for helping us to get to this point. It has been through our committee twice, with lots of amendments that have been amended and debated, and lots of discussion. We now have an opportunity to make good on the promise we have made to our children and grandchildren that these parks will be preserved for future generations. My colleagues with whom I worked include Senator Warner, who came up with this idea saying some of funds coming from offshore oil and gas and other energy projects could be diverted to these national parks to provide adequate resources to do this. We will see him on the floor this evening, and possibly Senator Alexander, who has been at this as well and is a key player, and also Senator Angus King. The four of us stuck together through thick and thin. I hope tonight will be the thin part and we can get this done over the next several days so that we can indeed keep the promise that we have made that these national treasures can be preserved. Senator Alexander, do you have something you would like to say?

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am here tonight on the floor to talk about a historic opportunity for our country and for our national parks--a true treasure of this country. When Teddy Roosevelt started the national parks, he wanted to preserve some of the most beautiful, pristine lands in America for public use. It was a good decision. Now we have 84 million acres of parkland all around the country. Some of them are historical parks, battlefields, or Presidents' homes. Some of them are like Yosemite or Yellowstone. The Tetons are known as spectacular, beautiful vistas. Others, like Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio, are really suburban parks. It sits between Cleveland and Akron, OH. It is the 13th most visited park in the United States of America. It is a fantastic park--for fishing, for hiking, for bicycling, for going on a scenic railroad. People love the parks. There is a good reason for that--because they are spectacular. In fact, visitation at the parks is up. During the 10 years just before the park centennial, which was in 2016, we had about a $58 million increase in visitors to our national parks. As the coronavirus begins to fade--thank goodness--more and more people are wanting to be outside, do things with their family, do something that is not expensive but is fun and healthy. Our national parks are the perfect place. As our parks begin to reopen, we are going to get more and more visitors to those parks. The problem is, when they go to these parks, they are going to find that there are some issues. These issues are that our national parks over the years have not kept up with their maintenance, with the basics of what you would expect in any organization--the water systems, the roads, the bridges, the bathrooms, the visitor centers, the trails. Many of these are now closed in some of our parks because they haven't had the funding to do the capital improvements, the things you would think about in deferred maintenance at your home. For instance, if your roof starts to leak, you want to fix it because if you don't, then your wall begins to get moldy or your floor begins to couple. That is what is happening in our national parks. Not only has Congress not provided the money for these more expensive infrastructure changes in our parks, but that has caused additional damage. Every day it is causing more and more damage. It is the biggest challenge we have in the parks. I was a member of what is called the Centennial Commission for the national parks, which is a private sector group that was formed when I was not in public office a few years ago, and it was working up to the 2016 centennial. The top issue was this deferred maintenance. I have been on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and have been passing legislation related to the parks. The Centennial Act we passed in 2016. That was very important because it provided more funding for the parks. Frankly, we could not come up with enough money through the appropriations process to deal with these long-term problems. Why? Because they are so expensive. In the parks, it is believed there is now a $12.5 billion shortfall--a $12.5 billion deferred maintenance project. We fund the parks every year, but we fund them for the rangers, for the naturalist programs. We fund some of the good work that is being done with schoolchildren and so on, but these big expenditures, like a new road or a new bridge or, in the case of Cuyahoga Valley National Park, a new railway system because the rails themselves need to be improved and replaced--those things are too doggone expensive for annual appropriations. Several years ago, some of us came up with an idea of providing more public-private partnerships with the parks. The Centennial Act, which I authored, does that. In fact, we have been able to provide a match of greater than 1 to 1 for money that is put into what is called our Centennial Challenge Fund. The money goes in from the Federal Government, and it has been matched more than 1 to 1 by private sector money. That is helpful, but it cannot again handle these huge expenditures. Another idea--Senator Mark Warner of Virginia actually came to me on this several years ago and said: Why don't we take some of the revenue that is coming from our oil and gas and other energy projects that are on Federal land, both onshore and offshore, and take some of those royalties--the revenue the Federal Government derives from that, which is not going to another purpose--and say that a part of those revenues, not all but a part of it, should be focused on this issue of infrastructure, of this deferred maintenance, that is growing and growing in our parks and getting more expensive every year if we don't fix it. I love that idea because that is exactly what the oil and gas revenue money ought to be used for--to help in terms of our natural resources. It is not everything. The $12.5 billion has about $6 billion of immediate projects that need to be handled right away. These are the priority projects. Those are the ones we focus on. For the next 5 years, in our legislation, we are requiring that enough of those resources from the royalties come in to handle that $6 million, assuming that the royalties are there. Right now, the cost of oil is so low that it would be tough to meet that. We think, over time, that will even out, and we will have enough. If there is not, then the money will not be there, but if it is, the money will be there to do exactly what we ought to do, which is, in the end, to save taxpayers' money by fixing some of these problems before they get worse. Some people say: Well, it is better to do it with an annual appropriations in Congress. I would say to that, in many respects, this funding for our park is a debt unpaid. In other words, it is money that we should have been paying all along to keep up with the roads, the bridges, the buildings, the railway systems, the seawalls--which I will talk about in a minute--but we haven't. We have allowed this to build up. In a way, this is a debt that is on our books that we have to deal with. Think about it in your family or in your business, if you allow these deferred maintenance problems to continue to grow, you end up having additional costs. We need to take care of it. This is a great way to do it, taking these revenues and applying it to these immediate problems. By the way, there was a lot of discussion in Congress over the years about shovel-ready projects. When you do infrastructure spending, you want it to be shovel-ready. These are shovel-ready because they have been vetted. We require the Park Service to provide us every year what their infrastructure needs are, what their priority infrastructure needs are and to rank them For every single national park property in America, we know what it is. As an example, this is the William Howard Taft birthplace in my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio. As you can see, the ceiling is leaking. What happens is, the ceiling leaks. And then, the walls are getting damaged, the floor is getting damaged, and some beautiful furniture from the Taft era is getting damaged. We need to fix it. It is a big expense. It is the entire roof that has to be repaired. Their annual budget is not nearly enough do that. They have an annual budget. It takes care of a few park rangers who are naturalists and interpreters. They have a lot of school kids who come through, as an example, and others who want to see the history of William Howard Taft's upbringing, who was a Chief Justice as well as President of the United States. There is no way the annual appropriation from Congress able to do something like that. It needs these additional resources. Here we are at the Cuyahoga National Valley National Park. This is one of the buildings. As you can see, it is not in great repair. They don't have money to take it down and not enough money to repair these kind of buildings. All they want to do with this building, by the way, is to take it down. It is a hazard. As you can imagine, it is attracting crime and drug use and other issues. They have several buildings like that. Here is another one. This is the railway I talked about at the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. I am here with the park director. This ranger is a guy who has been all around the country. He told me that in every single one of our parks, he has had to work through this issue. How do you take our budget and make sure you have the rangers, have the naturalist programs, and keep things in order but then don't have enough to pay for these big expenses? We are right near a bridge here that is also falling down. When the bridge is falling down, the people will not be able to access the trail and the bike trail. It is a big expense. You have to do it. Here I am at the Perry Monument. This is on Lake Erie. For those of you who have been to Put-in-Bay, you know it is a great place to go. The Perry Monument is awesome. It not only talks about William Perry and his history and legacy but the War of 1812 and all of the veterans of that war and the relationship now between Canada and the United States and the UK, now being our great allies. That was not always so. The War of 1812 was essential for the United States and something as part of a historical park to be remembered. The seawall that protects that memorial is crumbling. The seawalls don't last forever. This one is not lasting forever, particularly as the Lake Erie water level is increasing. You can see that not only is the seawall crumbling, but there are potholes behind me that cause sinkholes, they call them. People are not allowed to go out on the lakefront here in many places because of that. That is a huge expense to do a seawall. They have to do it to protect the monument itself. The visitor center there is not ADA compatible, the Americans with Disabilities Act. They need funding to do that, which is a major expense. These are the kinds of things we are talking about. This is not just my home State of Ohio. This is about $100 million that needs to come out of this fund just for the State of Ohio. Again, there are other States that have bigger national parks and more needs and more infrastructure and more roads and bridges that need help, but for us this is really important. We have to be sure that we are protecting this incredible treasure from future generations. That is what this legislation is about. It is going to be on the floor this week and voted on as part of the Great American Outdoors Act, which includes, also, money for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. I will say, with regard to the national park funding, this funding is directed at stewardship. In other words, not a single penny of the money we are talking about with Restore Our Parks Act that I have been describing can go to expansion of a park--not one penny. All of it has to go toward restoring the parks, toward stewardship of the parks. I think that is important because whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, I think you should agree that to the extent we have these parks and have this land, we need to take better care of them. It is our responsibility. We are the stewards. Our generation is the steward for future generations. We have not done it. This is an opportunity to right that wrong. We need to get back on track. My hope is that we will continue to see support for this on both sides of the aisle, both sides of the Capitol. It is really important. We saw on Monday night there was a first trial vote to be able to proceed to the debate on this bill. That vote was overwhelming--80 Senators voted for it out of 100. That is unusual around here. That shows, again, the bipartisan nature of this and the fact that this is carefully thought out. We spent a lot of time on it. We got it out of committee not once but a couple of times. We have done a lot of research on it. We made sure the parks are providing us with good data to know what these projects are, what are their highest priorities. There is a lot of discussion in this Chamber about putting more money into infrastructure, and maybe that will be done as part of the next legislation. They have been talking about it, in terms of the next stimulus package, to have infrastructure funding. Whether it is rural broadband or whether it is our ports or our roads or our bridges, I think there is an opportunity there. If you put a dollar in, you get more than a dollar back if you do the right kind of smart economic infrastructure. There are two problems with it. One, often it is not merit-based if Congress does it. Remember the Bridge to Nowhere years ago where there was a bridge in Alaska that didn't go anywhere, but we were going to pay millions of dollars for it. These are not ``bridges to nowhere.'' These projects have all been vetted. It is a merit-based process. Second, sometimes they just aren't shovel-ready. In other words, the priority is to fix something, but you don't have the permits; you don't have the approval. These are on national park lands. They have the approval. They are ready to go. They are shovel-ready. They are merit- based. Discussion around here often about infrastructure is not to pay for it with an offset but rather--because infrastructure spending returns capital, which it does if it is done properly. This would return a lot because this is stuff that is going to involve more visitors, more revenue being raised--through people coming to the parks and attendance at the parks--for the communities, certainly, that the parks are in but even for the parks themselves. We are talking often about not paying for it. Here, we actually do have it paid for. It is not a traditional pay-for--I acknowledge that--but it is funding that comes from the royalties, again, from offshore and onshore oil and gas and other energy projects that goes into fixing our national parks. It is our responsibility as stewards to do that. My hope is that what we will see tomorrow and the next day and maybe into next week, depending on how long people want to debate this, is that we can continue to have the support we saw on Monday night for our parks. It is one of the true treasures of our country. It is a great asset that if we don't fix it, it will not be there for future generations because these things--once they start to crumble, once the seawall is gone, the monument is gone. When you have a situation where bathrooms are closed or trails are closed, people are going to show up and be, understandably, disappointed that the U.S. Congress did not take advantage of this opportunity if we do not vote for this to be able to fix the parks for future generations. Finally, I would like to thank not just my colleague Senator Warner, whom I talked about earlier, who has been a champion on this issue, but also Senator Lamar Alexander and Senator Angus King. Senator Alexander has been involved in these issues for many years. Back in the Reagan administration, he was on another Commission. I mentioned the Centennial Commission for the parks. He was on another Commission for the great outdoors, which recommended dealing with this issue. Again, it has been the top issue for our national parks. If we can pass this legislation--$6.5 billion over the next 5 years for our national parks--this will truly be historic. This is, in a sense, a Teddy Roosevelt moment for us, in this generation, our generation, to be able to right the wrongs and fix the problems and get our parks back on track so they will be there for future generations. I also want to thank the President of the United States and his Cabinet because they have been helpful in this--the Secretary of the Interior, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. President Trump himself actually increased the size of this program by saying: Let's not just include our national parks; let's also include our national wildlife; let's include our national forests. This is even a broader program than just national parks now. This is really important. It was in the President's budget each of the last 3 years, and I appreciate that. That gives us a chance to talk about how to get this not just through the Senate and through the House but actually signed into law because the President is prepared to sign it if we can get our work done here. I hope my colleagues will do again what they did on Monday night-- recognize that this is an important initiative at a time when our country is once again polarized. We have plenty of issues between the coronavirus and what is happening on the streets. Isn't it good to see something that can bring our country, our Senate, our House, and our President together to do something that is important for future generations I yield back.

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

Mr. PORTMAN

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

Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I am on the floor to talk about the historic opportunity that is before this body this evening and throughout the week to be able to help us get our national parks back on track. These are our treasured national parks that are such a great asset to our country, and right now they are in trouble. One of the bills before us this week, in what is called the Great American Outdoors Act, is the bipartisan Restore Our Parks Act. It directs Federal funding from royalties on oil and gas leases and other energy leases to Federal lands. It directs that funding to our national parks to take care of deferred maintenance. Why is this investment needed? Thanks to the wisdom of Teddy Roosevelt, who had the foresight to set aside and preserve some of our most spectacular land for public use, and thanks to so many friends of the parks who have followed, America's national parks are without equal. The National Park Service and its system now comprise 84 million acres of land and historical sites that now attracts 330 million visitors every year. In fact, from 2006 to 2017, annual visitation in our parks increased by about 58 million people. They are popular. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it is clear there is a lot of demand to be in the out-of-doors. And so I believe as we start to reopen our parks this summer, which we will do soon, Americans will be all the more eager to go out to our parks and explore our country's natural beauty and explore its history. The problem is that when people head to the parks, they may be surprised that things are a little rundown. This isn't new. It has been happening to our parks for decades, actually. Some of the trails will be closed. Some of the bathrooms aren't going to be working. In places, roads and bridges will be crumbling, and visitor centers that have leaks in their roofs will be closed. It is a widespread problem of deferred maintenance that has gradually grown to become a huge backlog of around $12 billion at our national park sites. That is $12 billion in deferred maintenance that has not been taken care of. The good news is, with my colleagues Senator Warner, Senator Alexander, and Senator King, we introduced this commonsense solution a few years ago called Restore our Parks Act. It will address this backlog. To me, this is a debt unpaid. It would have been a lot smarter to pay it all along, by the way, but our annual appropriations here in Congress were never big enough, so what funds we had available went for things like park rangers, for programming, and, frankly, for applying bandaids to some of these maintenance problems. Other funds also, of course, went to expanding our parks. Let me make one thing clear: This bill before us today--the Restore Our Parks Act-- is all about stewardship. It is about taking better care of what we have. Not a penny of it can be used for expansion. Of course, one of our challenges right now, as a country coming out of the coronavirus pandemic, is to figure out how to get people back to work, and it is a real challenge because, although the jobs report on Friday was encouraging in terms of some jobs being added in May, we still have one of the highest unemployment rates we have ever had in this country. One place we have an opportunity to get people back to work is, of course, rebuilding our infrastructure. There are lots of discussions about that. Well, this legislation does that. These are shovel-ready projects--infrastructure projects that are ready to go. Last week, the National Parks Service released a new study that found that the Restore Our Parks Act will support 100,000 new jobs as we rebuild our national parks infrastructure over the next 5 years--40,000 direct jobs, about 60,000 indirect jobs--over 100,000 total new jobs. By the way, these are good jobs. These are jobs with good pay and good benefits. I first became involved in this issue of our national parks because I have grown to love the parks, as do so many Americans. Even those who don't have a chance to visit them very much are proud of the fact that we have this incredible system, this true treasure for our country. When I was about 12 years old, my mom and dad took us to Yellowstone Park, and we went camping, and we saw the geysers, and we got to see things that I had never seen before--just this spectacular park in the West. This amazing park system that we have in this country continues to be something I am proud of. So ever since I was 12 years old, I have been a parks fan. We have eight national parks in my home State of Ohio. One of those is called the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, which is our largest single park. It is actually the thirteenth most visited park in the country. You may not have heard of it, but it is an awesome park. It is kind of situated right in between Cleveland and Akron. It is a place where you can go biking; you can go hiking; you can go fishing; you can go kayaking; you can take a scenic railway through the park. It is a spectacular place, and it is accessed by a lot of people, being so close to the suburbs and even so close to the cities. It is not a typical park out in the rural area; it is a park that is really right up against the suburbs and close to the cities. I am proud to be one of the 2.7 million visitors a year that goes to Cuyahoga Valley National Park to take advantage of all those things I talked about. In addition to these larger parks, our park system also includes a lot of other sites. As an Ohio example, in my hometown of Cincinnati is the boyhood home of President William Howard Taft, who was both President and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Like everywhere else in our park system, all of these sites are getting rundown. Why has this happened? Well, again, because every year we appropriate funding for the operations of the park--for nature programs, for rangers, for day-to-day operations and activities--but we haven't provided enough money to provide for these maintenance needs. Think about it in terms of your own family or your own home or your own business. Taking that big step and making those capital improvements is a big, big cost, and we don't budget for that here very well. So we have allowed these maintenance projects to build up, meaning a lot of buildings, a lot of infrastructure--roads, bridges, water systems--are deteriorating to the point that a lot of them are really completely unusable. I have seen this firsthand as I have visited our Ohio parks. Here are a couple photos of some of the visits we have made. I go to Cuyahoga Valley National Park frequently, as I said, and there are always a lot of school field trips, a lot of hikers, a lot of other visitors. It is a great park, but it needs about $50 million in repair--just that one park, Cuyahoga National Park. The railroad track is in such bad repair--and it is behind me here-- that it is dangerous or will be soon to go on that scenic railroad. So we have to fix the railroad tracks. Some of the trails seem to be falling apart because of erosion. An $11 million budget is the annual budget for that park, Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Again, it is the thirteenth most visited park in the country, yet they have a $50 million backlog--a $50 million backlog. So it is just not sustainable. I also visited the Perry monument a couple of times in the last couple of years, including last summer. Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial is on the shores of Lake Erie. It honors those who fought in the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812, which was such a critically important battle for our victory. It also celebrates the long-lasting peace between the U.K., Canada, and the United States. So it is an important historical marker. There I saw some of the $48 million in long-delayed maintenance needs at that site, which includes millions in needed repairs to a concrete seawall--and here is the seawall. You can see some of the damage to it. There are also sinkholes behind me here. We have to repair that seawall, but, boy, it is a big cost. But if you don't repair it, you continue to have other damage, including the road behind me, and, obviously, people are not permitted to go near the lake there. So $48 million is a lot for that small memorial, small national park. The visitors' center there also needs upgrades. It needs to be made ADA accessible, an example--Americans with Disabilities Act. Again, the budget for that park is miniscule, but the maintenance needs are huge. It is not just our outdoor spaces that need work. The past 2 years I have visited the Taft home in Cincinnati where President William Howard Taft was born and raised. The house is still in pretty good condition, but there are infrastructure upgrades that have to be made--repairing the roof, repairing some of the woodwork. You can see the roof here and some of the mold. When you don't repair the roof, what happens? The roof leaks, and the walls get moldy, and the floor begins to couple. So whether it is your house or whether it is our national parks, that is what is happening. We have to do this in order to ensure that the costs don't expand even further, which is what happens, again, in your own home. If you don't fix that roof, you have all kinds of other problems, and they compound. The compounding problem in our national parks is not just $12 billion. If we don't address it, it will grow to be much greater than that. The longer we wait, the more expensive it gets. The same story is true with all of our parks all around our country, and it is time for us to fix it. By the way, people ask me: Well, how do you know what the most urgent needs are? Because we require the parks to keep it. We require them to tell the U.S. Congress every year their highest priority needs, spell them out, in specific terms, what is needed--what the cost is, how long the repairs would take, and so on. This is why I said that they are shovel ready, because we know what these projects are. Here is the deferred maintenance cost in Ohio, as an example, just for Ohio--again, totaling $114 million. Here is the Perry's Victory Memorial, $48 million; here is the Cuyahoga Valley National Park at almost $52 million. Again, at some of our bigger parks around the country, the costs are even higher. So this is an opportunity for us to do the right thing by these treasures that we have, to make sure they don't continue to deteriorate. This is where our Restore Our Parks Act is so important to pass. As I said earlier, this legislation is going to support more than 100,000 jobs and cut into that maintenance backlog. What is even better about this legislation is that taxpayers aren't the ones footing the bill. Instead, this bill creates what is called the Legacy Restoration Fund, which will provide $1.9 billion per year for 5 years from 50 percent of the unobligated on- and offshore energy revenue. Again, this comes from on- and offshore oil, gas, and other energy projects. This means we will have $9.5 billion to be divided across the National Park Service and other Federal Land Management agencies. It will not fund every needed repair, but the $6.5 billion our parks are going to get will address all of the high priority items, so 6.5 out of 12, roughly half--a little more than half--of those projects, but it does comprise all of the high-priority items for our national parks. It is a win-win, especially right now. This enables us to restore our parks and our public lands--these great national treasures. It supports jobs at a time when people are anxious to get back to work, and it does all this by taking this funding that comes from the leases--oil, natural gas, and other energy projects. It is good for our economy. We need to get people back to work again, and it is an example of how Congress can pass laws that both create jobs and serve the public's interests. It is particularly good news that we are voting on it this week, because the quicker we act, the better. I want to thank Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for allowing us to bring this to the floor. I want to thank my colleagues on both sides of the aisle who have worked so hard on this legislation. Specifically, I want to thank Senator Warner, who came up with this great idea of shifting the funding from the oil, gas, and other energy projects--some of these royalty moneys--into this particular project. I have worked for years on parks. I am the author of the Centennial Act, which was back in 2016 for our national parks, which helps to get public-private partnerships involved, which I strongly support. That has helped a little bit on the maintenance, but it is not nearly enough money. So we need to do more, and that is what this legislation does. I also want to thank Senator Alexander and Senator King for their work on this national parks legislation. I also want to thank my other colleagues who have been so involved in this broader package. That would be Senator Gardner, Senator Manchin, Senator Daines. That is the Great American Outdoors Act. They helped me to put that together. This is the right thing to do for our country at the right time. I want to also say that the Trump administration strongly supports this legislation, and that has been really important, too, to get it in the budget, to be sure that the Office of Management and Budget, where I used to serve, is on board, because the funding here is not our typical appropriations funding, and I thank them for that. I thank President Trump for helping us to ensure that this can come to the floor today and can actually get passed by the U.S. Congress and then signed into law. Let's do it. On a bipartisan basis, let's do something positive this week to move our country forward, to create more jobs, and to ensure that our wonderful national parks are there for future generations. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.