Rob Portman

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Res. 591, which was submitted earlier today.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, this week, the Congress continues to work on a bipartisan basis to try to respond to this coronavirus pandemic. We have heard that the House of Representatives, under Democratic majority, has a new proposal. We have ideas on our side. We have already passed four pieces of legislation that deal with the coronavirus pandemic. The total spending is about $2.5 trillion that has already been spent. The Speaker of the House proposed a new piece of legislation this week that I think the House will vote on Friday. That is another $3 trillion. It is actually more than the previous four combined. The legislation that she is proposing has a lot of items that aren't directly related to the COVID-19 crisis. They are, as some have said, a wish list of priorities, and others have said in the media that it is more of a messaging bill. We will see. Among other things, it says, as an example, that they want to change the current law, which says that you are limited in terms of how much of a Federal tax deduction you can take for State and local taxes. That is called the SALT issue. They want to repeal that. That cost, by the way, is about $180 billion--something like that. It would result in about 50 percent of the tax benefit going to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. That doesn't sound like something that is going to be impactful in terms of the coronavirus pandemic we face. I can think of a lot of better ways to spend that money, including more testing, including ensuring that small businesses can get back on their feet, ensuring that our healthcare system is sound, and other things. We are going to continue to work on that. My hope is that, as we did with the previous four, we can figure out a way to come together--Republicans, Democrats, House, and Senate--and look at what we have already spent, $2.5 trillion, and see how it has been spent, understand what some of the gaps might be and address those gaps. As we are working on this issue, this pandemic is continuing to wreak havoc all over the country. It has been devastating, let's face it. We now have 30 million--30 million--of our fellow Americans who have lost their jobs and are looking for unemployment insurance. These are people who lost their jobs through no fault of their own. They lost their jobs because the pandemic infected the economy, and they don't have a place to work. I know friends of mine, people I have known for a long time, who have never been unemployed and are unemployed now for the first time. They are getting unemployment insurance for the first time. They want to go back to work, but they don't have a job right now. That has been devastating to them and to a lot of small businesses. I talked to people who have poured their lives and their resources into these businesses. A guy tells me, I have been doing this for 40 years. I started with a couple of people and got to a few more and a few more. And now, boom, my doors are closed. Think of the movie theaters and the bowling alleys and the small restaurants, the hotels, anything to doing with travel and tourism, and these businesses are in tough shape. So is the beauty parlor and the nail salon and the barbershop. This is testing our resolve in ways that we had never expected. I guess that is part of the point, we had never expected it because we weren't prepared for this kind of pandemic. Congress, again, has tried to help with these four measures we already passed. I think they have helped, particularly with a lot of the small businesses, and our healthcare system has been helped. Trillions of dollars--$2.5 trillion of taxpayer funds have gone out to try to be a rescue package to help people weather this storm. Again, I hope the next package can be effective, not just in weathering the storm but also in getting the economy moving--more stimulus, giving small businesses the tax relief to encourage them to invest more and add more jobs, maybe some smart spending in terms of infrastructure; things like rural broadband that will create more jobs immediately but also bring us closer to having real access for people in poor areas of our country to be able to do the small business development, to do telehealth, to do telelearning through broadband. There are some things I think we can do that will actually help to stimulate more economic growth. As we work to address these problems at home, let's not forget how we got here. My colleague from Wyoming just talked about this, but there is a clear consensus now about one thing, which is that this all started in Wuhan, China, which is a huge city in China, Hubei Province, and that information about this horrible virus was concealed by the Chinese Communist Party. Systematically and very deliberately they kept the rest of the world from knowing about it By the way, they kept it from their own people too. To the point made earlier, this is not about the Chinese people. This is about the Chinese Government, meaning the Chinese Communist Party, deciding: Oh, gosh. We have a problem here. Let's not tell anybody--which goes against all the rules. If you are a country and you have a virus that is spreading, your responsibility--particularly as a member of the World Health Organization--is to tell your own people but also tell the rest of the world so that you can contain that virus. They concealed it, deliberately. They must be held accountable for that. Think of the devastation they have caused, not just in our country but around the world--the number of people who have died, the people whose lives have been turned upside down, the economy that has been destroyed by this. This information, this critical information, having been withheld from the Chinese people and from the world has had a devastating impact. At the start of this year, in January, apparently the Chinese Communist Party said: Don't worry. There is no human-to-human transmission of this virus--no human-to-human transmission of this virus. They knew otherwise. By the way, 4 million cases worldwide tell us they knew otherwise--4 million cases. It all started in one place, in Wuhan, China. There are now 4 million cases. This is something that is serious, and we need to address it. We are also told that the Chinese Communist Party allowed people to travel from Hubei Province, from Wuhan city--not to other parts of China, apparently, but to the rest of the world. If they had cut off travel to places like Italy and the UK and the United States, we would not be where we are now. Luckily, our administration acted quickly to shut off immigration from China, from those hotspots, and for American citizens and the green card holders, they had to go into quarantine. That helped, but the virus was already here. Very disturbing to me is apparently some Chinese Communist Party disinformation went out claiming that America was at fault somehow. This was classic propaganda disinformation. It is adding insult to injury. Right? Not only did they not do what they should have done, to tell the world about this and to help us to be able to contain this virus--and, by the way, the World Health Organization was there to help them. We were there to help them. We offered to go in. They wouldn't let the World Health Organization experts come in for well over a month after they knew. Some say it was a few months because they probably knew it the end of last year. They must have, given the number of cases they had. They also kept the experts out from the United States who could have been helpful. The World Health Organization is an international body where you have membership, and they have requirements where you are required to report data. You are required to have them come in when you have a virus like this. Of course, we didn't know it was a pandemic at the time, but we had a virus here that was concerning. Instead, it appears the World Health Organization, instead of being an early warning system for the rest of us, all around the world, which is what they should be--a virus starts, and they are the ones who go in and deal with it--instead of being an early warning system, in a sense, they were apologists for China. That is why some of us have called for an investigation of the World Health Organization. We have asked the United Nations to convene a special panel, some of us, to be able to look into this issue so that it is not just America. The rest of the world ought to be involved in this as well. All of the members of the WHO ought to be concerned. I believe they are, about the deference they showed to China, at a time we needed them to be on the spot helping. We now find ourselves forced to rely on the source of the virus, China, for a lot of our PPE, personal protective equipment. Think of the masks and the gloves and the gowns that our frontline healthcare workers need and others who are now interfacing with customers and working together as coworkers. We have to rely on China for this. In order to safely treat the COVID-19 patients who are sick and because of this virus that originated in China, we now have to rely on China for this safety equipment. That is unfortunate, and that needs to change. We need to produce more of this here from more reliable sources. We are hearing reports about delays in shipments now. We are hearing about poor quality products--all of this is combining to affect our ability to be able to respond. The virus has brought pain and suffering to our shores and to countries all around the world. Again, if they had followed the rules, if China had played by the rules--again, not the Chinese people who were also kept in the dark but the Chinese Communist Party--if they had followed the rules, we wouldn't be in the situation we are in. By the way, none of this is news when it comes to China's behavior on the international stage. Getting China to play by the rules has been a constant theme of mine and others for a long time. Fifteen years ago, I was a U.S. Trade Representative, and I brought forward the first successful case against China in the World Trade Organization because they weren't playing by the rules. I also wrote a report entitled ``Top to Bottom Review of U.S.-China Economic Relationship'' that made policy recommendations to improve the equity, durability, and balance of our trade relationship with China. My No. 1 priority was China. When I was there, I established, for the first time, a USTR prosecutor just for China. One of the recommendations was supposed to put a negotiator in China from the U.S. Trade Rep's office. It is there now. Here in the Senate, as the chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, I have now led three bipartisan investigations on China, including the Chinese Communist Party's use of what is called the Confucius Institute at our high schools, sometimes grade schools, at our colleges and universities. We learned more than 100 U.S. universities had allowed the Chinese Government to operate these centers, which often come with stipulations, requiring them to comply with Chinese law--Chinese law-- even when they are operating in the United States. We know some of these Confucius Institutes have been used as platforms for economic espionage. By the way, since we published our report in February of 2019, a year ago, more than 20 Confucius Institutes in the United States have closed their doors. Why? Because people have looked into this and determined this is not just a cultural exchange. This has other aspects to it; as an example, not being able to teach the real history of China, as if things like Tiananmen Square did not exist. That is not something we should allow to happen in this country. That doesn't comply with our standards here of honesty and intellectual standards that says you have to teach the actual history, not what the Chinese Communist Party says is the history. Our students shouldn't be subject to that. These Confucius Institutes have also spent a lot of money in this country. Schools have taken money and have not properly reported it. That is what our report indicated. As a result, the Department of Education is now cracking down on some of these schools to say you have to, at a minimum, report the funding. Our subcommittee is right now wrapping up its review of three Chinese Government-owned telecom firms that the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, licensed to operate here 20 years ago. We share concerns with the Justice Department regarding these telecommunications companies complying with U.S. law enforcement requests and whether these entities pose a national security risk by being vulnerable to exploitation by the Chinese Government and the Chinese Communist Party. Last year, the FCC denied a license to China Mobile to operate in the United States for these same reasons. That investigation is coming to a head. We are going to have a report coming out soon. We will learn more about this. But again, we have to be sure we are not naive; that we understand what is going on when these Chinese telecommunications firms are here in this country. The third Permanent Subcommittee investigation involves another instance where China has not been playing by the rules as it relates to stealing U.S. research and technology, often paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Before the coronavirus put so much of our country on hold, we were preparing to introduce legislation that was a result of our bipartisan report and our yearlong investigation. That report details how China has used what is called talent recruitment programs, most notably what is called the Thousand Talents Plan, to steal U.S. taxpayer-funded research. It turns out this has been going on for a long time. For 20 years, this has been going on. It has helped fuel the rise of the Chinese military and the Chinese economy during those 20 years. You might ask, how has this happened? Every year, Federal grantmaking agencies, like the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy's National Labs, or the National Science Foundation, give out taxpayer dollars for research. By the way, it is about $150 billion a year. It is a lot of money. These are important research projects. This is a good thing for our country. It leads to new breakthroughs in science and technology. It is helping make the United States the world leader in innovation. Your tax dollars coming to Washington, going to the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, and National Science Foundation, out to researchers and colleges and universities and research institutes--$150 billion a year--have led to a lot of breakthroughs. The open and collaborative nature of research that is done here in the United States is one of the reasons we attract some of the best and brightest scientists and researchers from all around the world to take part in this research. Yet what we have learned--and through our report, we prove--is that this system is very vulnerable. It is vulnerable to theft by other countries, and that is exactly what is happening in the case of China. China has made it no secret that its goal is to surpass the United States as the world leader in scientific research. One way it has been doing that is by using secret contracts with researchers here in the United States. Again, it is doing research that is funded by tax dollars--medical research, scientific research, military research. The Chinese Government has actually been paying these people to provide information to the Chinese Government to take this research and pay for it by U.S. tax dollars. It is wrong, and it needs to stop, and our legislation is intended to do just that. At one of our Senate hearings on the report, a State Department witness 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.'' In other words, the Chinese Communist Party has decided this talent recruitment program is going to be well funded. We are going to pay American researchers to give us their stuff but then also to connect them to the Chinese university system, which the Chinese Communist Party is using as the way to get technology, to acquire technology. Again, it is not a new problem. This has been going on for two decades, but we have done little in this country to stop it because we have this history of being so open and accessible with our research. The FBI came to our hearing and acknowledged this. From the Federal Bureau of Investigation, they said that ``it should have taken more rapid and comprehensive action in the past'' to respond to these Chinese talent recruitment programs. Yes, they should have. Yes, they should have. Fortunately, the FBI and the Department of Justice have now taken a different approach. They have begun stepping up their efforts this year with several recent high-profile arrests and having charges filed, but, again, more laws and practices need to change to stop U.S. taxpayer- funded research from being stolen in this way to benefit our No. 1 global competitor, which is why we are introducing this legislation. The legislation is called the Safeguarding American Innovation Act-- to protect American research and strengthen our national security. The legislation makes five necessary reforms to address the flaws in our current research enterprise and to stop intellectual property theft and promote a more secure and transparent process that is consistent with the recommendations we laid out in our report. First, the report found numerous cases of U.S.-funded researchers who failed to disclose foreign sources of compensation on their Federal grant applications. This issue has been highlighted this year. You have probably heard about it because you may remember that earlier this year there was the shocking arrest of Dr. Charles Lieber, the chair of Harvard University's Chemistry Department, who was being paid both by Harvard and the Thousand Talents program by the Chinese Communist Party, it turns out. According to the FBI, without Harvard's knowledge--he didn't tell Harvard--Dr. Lieber was being paid up to $50,000 a month in salary by the Chinese, $150,000 annually for living expenses, and more than $1.5 million to establish and run a shadow lab in China. Interestingly, the lab was in Wuhan, China. None of this was disclosed on his Federal grant application from which he got U.S. taxpayer money. If it had been disclosed, he wouldn't have gotten the money. That is just wrong. The criminal complaint is based on his not telling the truth to the Federal investigators, even though he was essentially defrauding Harvard and defrauding the U.S. Government's funding sources, but that is not a crime. Failing to disclose compensation from a foreign government is not currently a crime. We make it a crime. That is part of our legislation. The bill gives the Justice Department the ability to hold Federal grant recipients accountable for hiding their financial ties to foreign governments by failing to disclose them on Federal grant applications. Transparency and honesty on grant applications is critical to the integrity of the U.S. research enterprise and to stopping this theft. That is in our legislation. Second, despite there being more than $150 billion in taxpayer funding going to these Federal research agencies every year, there is no unified tracking process to determine where these funds go. The National Science Foundation, for instance, doesn't have anyone who handles grant oversight. Again, we have been too lax. That is why the bill requires the Federal Office of Management and Budget, the OMB, to streamline and coordinate grantmaking between the agencies to ensure that the billions of taxpayer dollars going to research every year can be accounted for every step of the way. Having this information is also going to save time and money for our research institutions and our universities. They will now know where the funding is, where it is going, and how it is being used. Third, the State Department is on the frontline here in vetting visa applications for visiting scholars and visiting students, but it is not permitted to deny visas to individuals who come from overseas who are intent on stealing U.S. research. That is just wrong. Our research enterprise in this country must remain open. We agree with that, for we want to attract people from around the world, of course, but we have to have commonsense safeguards to prevent bad actors from taking advantage of our openness. The legislation does that. It authorizes the State Department to deny visas to foreign researchers who seek to access sensitive U.S. research when it is determined that doing so will pose a threat to our economic or to our national security. By the way, the State Department wants this authority. The career officers who came and testified before us said we would like to have this authority because we know we are letting people in who are coming for one reason and one reason only, and that is to take U.S. research. Fourth, our report detailed a systematic lack of knowledge at the U.S. research institutions about the threat posed by the Thousand Talents Plan and other forms of academic espionage. For example, we found that the Thousand Talents program had recruited a member who downloaded more than 30,000 files from a Department of Energy National Lab. These are our top National Labs in the country--highly secretive. There were 30,000 files that were downloaded without authorization, of course, and that researcher took those files with him back to China. Our bill requires that research institutions have safeguards in place to prohibit the unauthorized access to sensitive research. They have to tighten it up. Finally, we found that nearly 70 percent of U.S. universities have consistently failed to report substantial foreign gifts as required by current law. Our bill ensures transparency by requiring universities now to report any foreign gift of $50,000 or more and empowering the Department of Education to fine universities. These are new fines to universities that repeatedly fail to disclose these gifts. Now, there are some in the university community who don't love our legislation. I would just ask them: Given what has happened, given what we know is happening in terms of the theft of U.S. research, are you really going to stand in the way of legislation that just says you have to report when you receive more than $50,000 from a foreign government? Is that too much to ask? I don't think so Right now, they are supposed to report gifts of a higher level, and 70 percent of them have failed to do so. So it is not too much to ask, and I would hope that the university community will be supportive. Many are, but some are apparently saying they are going to try to block this legislation. Don't do that. That would be wrong. The failure to stop the coronavirus early on has highlighted how China does not play by the rules, whether they be the World Health Organization's rules or the trade rules we talked about earlier, and now it is with regard to this issue that we are dealing with in terms of taking U.S. research back to China in order to fuel China's military and China's economy. When this pandemic passes and our universities and research institutions reopen their doors, I have no doubt that we will, once again, continue to attract the best and the brightest. Why? Because our research enterprise is the best. We are innovators, and we provide funding for it, and we have such great opportunities here in this country to do research. People like to come here, but we cannot sit idly by as our top global competitor steals that research. The Safeguarding American Innovation Act is an important step toward protecting it for the safety and security of every American. Now, more than ever, we have to adapt to the fact that China is not going to play by the same set of rules as the rest of the world. It has been 15 years since we put out a USTR report stating that our relationship with China lacks ``equity, durability,'' and sustainability. Right now, our No. 1 priority is solving the coronavirus crisis. We have to do that. There is no question that it ought to be our focus. Yet, in the context of this crisis, we also need to reevaluate how we do business with China. We have to look at this with fresh eyes. My hope is that this legislation we have talked about this evening will help to allow us to reset the way we conduct our research so we can continue to reward those who come to our shores to discover new breakthroughs in science and technology while we keep China and other nation-state competitors from stealing that research for their own purposes. We can achieve that balance, and we must National Police Week Mr. President, I rise to pay tribute to our police officers all around the country. The men and women in blue serve us every day in Ohio and every State represented in this Chamber. This week is National Police Week. In normal times, right now we would have tens of thousands of officers here in town. They do a big parade every year. We have them in our offices. We get to meet with them and thank them for their service. We would be able to have the opportunity to hear their stories--to hear some of the brave, brave stories of those who have lost their lives over the past year. They do a wonderful presentation down at the memorial to thank and pay tribute to those officers. Yet, even during this coronavirus, I am pleased that, this Friday, folks around the country will be showing their support anyway. They can't come here in person, but people are going to be displaying blue ribbons and blue lights on their homes. The service to our communities that these police officers give us every day has been more valuable during this crisis than it has ever been, and I thank those police officers for going out every day and putting their health right now and even their lives, as they always do, on the line for all of us. As I said earlier, I want to be sure that our municipalities and our counties have the ability to pay those police officers so as to keep them out on the street. That is why we need the flexibility in the Federal funding that is going out because the budgets of these municipalities are constrained. Because of the bad economy--because of the coronavirus--we have to be sure that police officers are taken care of. This week, National Police Week, is a time of pause, a time to think about the sacrifices these heroes make every day in order to keep our communities safe, which is what they do every single day. They take dangerous criminals and weapons and drugs off of our streets. They enforce the laws we write here in this body. We write a lot of laws here. They are the ones who are in the trenches--on the frontlines-- enforcing them. Even their very presence helps to deter crime and keep our communities safer. So we thank them for the risks they take for themselves, and we thank their families for the sacrifices they make for all of us. This week is a time to think about the police officers in our country who have died in the line of service over the last year. Again, this would normally be done in person down at the memorial, but I want to talk about the four brave individuals who have lost their lives in Ohio since we last had a National Police Week, which was a year ago. In January, Officer Dale James Woods, of the Colerain Police Department in Southwest Ohio, was tragically struck and killed by a vehicle while he was responding to a traffic stop. Officer Woods devoted his entire life to public service. He served for 15 years in the town's fire department--the Colerain Fire Department--and then 15 years as a police officer. He did everything that could be asked of an officer. They tell me sometimes he would be staffing the dispatch station. The next day, he would be tracking down a lost dog. The next day, he would be out there helping a citizen with a complaint. He did everything that was asked of him with unwavering professionalism and the commitment that we all come to expect from our police officers. Officer James Woods of the Colerain Police Department, thank you. The same can be said for Clermont County Sheriff's Deputy William Lee Brewer, Jr., who died in the line of duty in February of 2019 during a standoff with a criminal. Deputy Bill Brewer was a 20-year veteran of the force. He was a local guy, someone whom everyone in the community knew and loved. He gave his life for that community--the ultimate sacrifice an officer can make. I attended his funeral and had the opportunity to meet a lot of his fellow officers and hear stories about him. I also got a chance to meet his wonderful family. I can say he was admired and respected by all. The turnout for that funeral was unbelievable. Last November, we lost Detective Jorge Del Rio, a decorated 30-year veteran of the Dayton Police Department. Detective Del Rio had been working with the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency, on a task force to crack down on drugs coming into a community that had been ravaged by the opioid crisis. This was during a time when Dayton was one of the communities in the country that had the most opioid overdoses and all of the crime related to that, and Jorge Del Rio was there to help. He was shot twice in the face while serving a warrant in relation to an investigation into drugs. From the crime scene, investigators recovered cash, fentanyl--the deadliest of all the opioids--and marijuana, along with weapons. Detective Del Rio fought bravely for his life, but in the end, his wounds were too much to bear. This is an issue that is very personal to me. I have spent a lot of my time working on this drug crisis and trying to get Congress to pass legislation to stop this addiction so that officers like Detective Del Rio don't have to fight and die in fighting this scourge in our communities. I was honored to attend Detective Del Rio's visitation, where I joined hundreds of grateful citizens in an arena. Again, the turnout was unbelievable with fellow officers, DEA officers, and police officers. Officers came from all over the region. When I spoke with Kathy--his wife--and their family, I told them his sacrifice was not in vain and that he would always be remembered as a hero of Dayton, OH. Earlier this spring, we lost another hero, Springdale Police Officer Kaia LaFay Grant. On March 21, Officer Grant was helping her fellow officers chase down a suspect who was fleeing by car. During the pursuit, the criminal deliberately rammed his vehicle into her cruiser, which caused her to crash. Officer Grant's injuries, sadly, were fatal. An 8-year veteran of the force, she was the first ever casualty of the Springdale Police Department and the first female law enforcement officer in the tristate area to die in the line of duty in more than 100 years. Officer Grant was only 33 years old. My thoughts are with her family as they deal with this tragic loss. Although these heroic officers were taken from us, their examples can never be taken away and will not be. Ohioans will remember them as models of bravery and service, as examples of fellow citizens who, on behalf of all of the rest of us, have the habit of walking into danger rather than running away from it. In our Nation's history, more than 24,000 police officers have died in the line of duty. Think about that--24,000. Serving as an officer is a dangerous job, I know, but we have legislation that we think would help save the lives of some of those officers who put themselves in harm's way. I was proud to join colleagues last year in sponsoring legislation called the Back the Blue Act. It is very simple. It says, if you target law enforcement officers, you are going to pay a very, very high price. That is appropriate. We think Back the Blue Act, which would increase penalties on those who would attempt to harm or kill a police officer, is going to make a difference because it will send a very strong message in helping to deter some of these crimes. Ultimately, I think that it will make our heroes in blue safer and help to save lives. Again, I urge my colleagues to join me in standing tall with our police officers and thanking them this week for what they do every day to protect us. Let's back the blue. Let's do everything we can to ensure that our police officers know we are with them and that we are at their side as they do their critical job every day to protect us. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, a couple of months ago, I introduced legislation here on the floor of the Senate with my colleague Dick Durbin from Illinois. He is on the other side of the aisle. In a bipartisan way, we said: Let's let Congress vote remotely. Let's use safe and secure means to do that. The technology is out there to do that. It has to be safe, but let's let Congress weigh in and vote remotely when we can't meet. These last 6 weeks are an example of that, but it is not just about this pandemic. I have actually been talking about this for 25 years because I believe it is important for Congress to be able to meet when there is any reason we can't come together or shouldn't come together. After 9/11, a lot of people were more focused on this because a terrorist act--particularly a bioterrorist act--could have the same effect, of course. There have been periods of time where Congress has not been able to meet here, and there have been other periods of time like during the Cold War, when there was actually a bunker set up in the hills of West Virginia somewhere for us to convene for fear that there could be a nuclear attack. So Congress has thought about this before, but Congress has never been able to put in place the ability for us to vote remotely, for us to have debate remotely, and for us to have hearings remotely. I think that is too bad because we are the voice of the people. We represent individual congressional districts on the other side of the Capitol. We represent individual States here. The Constitution set it up so that we are out here listening to people we represent, and we come here to represent that voice. The executive branch has its own role, and it is a very important one, but it shouldn't take over the legislative branch role because they are different, and the Founders intended it that way, to have this separation of powers By the way, other countries have done this. The United Kingdom has begun to conduct its proceedings remotely. The EU has started to vote remotely--the European Union. There are several other countries that have come up with one way or another to work remotely--to telework, in essence. By the way, about 14 States have also figured this out so that they can convene meetings and so on, and some of them even vote remotely. So I think it is time to do it. Last week, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which I chair, had the first remote hearing in the history of the Congress, and it worked really well. We had three witnesses. We had several Members of the Senate participate. The witnesses were all around the country, so we didn't have to call them here to Washington. We didn't have to gather as a group and therefore risk one of us infecting another or exposing us to the coronavirus. The witnesses were testifying from their homes, from a living room in one case. One of the witnesses actually testified from the cab of a pickup truck because she was at her sister's place and didn't want to do it in the house. So she got in the pickup truck with her laptop, and it worked great. It worked great. We were able to ask questions and get answers. It worked just like a regular hearing. I was appreciative that the Rules Committee allowed us to do that. By the way, the technology is, in a sense, off-the-shelf technology because it is their technology. They have it. We didn't have to recreate the wheel. It worked last week. We used it. I think it can be a template for other hearings. By the way, I am pleased to say that today, I participated in two more remote hearings. Even though we are here in session, we are having remote hearings because it is not wise for us to all gather together with the staff and with the Capitol Police and others. It is safer for us to do this remotely. By the way, both of these hearings went well. One was in the Finance Committee, and the other was in the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. By the way, our hearing last week was online. You can check it out at psi.gov. The two hearings today were both online, live-streamed today. This does not mean that you cut out the public. In fact, I would say it is just the opposite. During these last 6 weeks, we could have had hearings every week and kept the public informed as to what we were thinking and gotten more input from the public in an official way and in a way that was so transparent that everybody could have been engaged in it, if they wanted to, just like C-SPAN, except it is online. This is something we can now do, and I hope we will continue to do it. I hope we will be sure that, as we do this, we also take serious this idea of not just having hearings and not just having the ability to interact as Republicans and Democrats but actually have the ability to vote remotely when we shouldn't be here. Again, it needs to be safe, and I think we can do that. I am convinced that if we put our minds to it, the technology is not the problem; the problem is tradition. I am not against tradition. A lot of them make sense. But do you know what? Tradition around here has changed a lot over the years. There didn't used to be a filibuster, as an example, which is how we live right now, to get 60 votes for everything. That is OK. I am not saying it is a bad tradition to have changed, but the point is that we change tradition here a lot, and it is time for us to look at this. It is time for us essentially to catch up. Most of the people I represent are doing this. To one extent or another, they are teleworking. Most people in America today are realizing that you can actually get a lot done online, remotely. Today, I talked to some healthcare professionals who were telling me about one of the rare silver linings in this dark cloud that has descended upon our country. It is the fact that telemedicine has been proved over the past couple of months to be pretty darn effective. In many cases, it has been used because people are concerned or afraid about coming to a hospital or going to their doctor, but they can get the advice through telemedicine. I talked to some educators today. In fact, I also talked to the Ohio Farm Bureau today. I talked to a mom who is at home with her kids during the day now because her kids are home from school because schools have been closed. We talked about how much she has been able to learn about telelearning and how there is an opportunity here to do more outside of the classroom. It is not that we shouldn't get back to classrooms--I think we should. I think that is an opportunity for kids to interact, which is important. But we are beginning to acknowledge that we can also do more after school in terms of telelearning. So this is just another example of it. This is a change that I think must be made to prepare us for the realities of this 21st century, where these contingencies come up. It is a pandemic today. It may be something else tomorrow. By the way, the way our legislation works for voting is that it is temporary. So I don't think this should be the norm. I think it should be only in emergencies and only when the majority leader and the Democratic leader--so in a bipartisan way--decide it is the appropriate thing to do, and then, under our legislation, every 30 days, Congress would have to vote--presumably remotely--to reaffirm it. Otherwise, it ends. So it would be temporary, it would be in emergencies only, and it would be up to Republicans and Democrats alike at the leadership level to decide it is time to try remote voting and to be sure that we, as the Members of the people's House across the way and the Members of the world's greatest deliberative body here in the Senate, as we are called, have the chance to represent the millions of people we are charged with representing by being their voice here on the Senate floor. I hope we can, along with the times, change here and begin to be more effective in representing those constituents.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, it is good to be back in session. After 6 weeks away from this place, it is good that we are all together working on some very important things. In the past 6 weeks, since we haven't been here in session working together, a lot has changed. America has been overtaken, really, not just by the coronavirus but by the economic damage it has caused. More than 30 million Americans have now filed for unemployment, and most believe we are approaching the highest unemployment we have had in this country since the Great Depression. It is a concern and particularly troubling because, if you think about it, just a few months ago, back in February, we hit a 50-year low in terms of unemployment in this country. So we have gone from a strong and growing economy to one where many people are out of work and many businesses have been shuttered. Some of these businesses tell me they may have shuttered permanently. I hope not, but it has been a tough time. At the same time, churches and schools have been closed. Some States have begun to reopen their economies, which is fantastic, but a majority of Americans are still living by very strict social distancing guidelines. I hear constantly from Ohioans about how much this has upended their lives. Sometimes small business owners will tell me a heartbreaking story of how they spent 30 or 40 years building a business, and now they have seen it devastated. They are in a situation where they have no cash flow and can't keep the business open. At the same time, a lot of Americans have been teleworking. They have still been working, but they haven't been going to the office or going to the factory. They have been working from home and figuring it out. Just like everything else, here in the Senate, we have been affected by this pandemic. As I said, we have been shut down for 6 weeks. This started back in March. One of our colleagues actually came down with the virus, but it was really on the advice of health officials and public health experts that we decided not to reconvene. It was probably the safe thing to do at the time. Again, it is good we are back now. We are back now with the recommendation of the attending physician and other top medical experts. We have been wearing our masks dutifully and when appropriate. We have been keeping our social distance. My desk is actually over there, but there was another Senator over there, so they put me here, which is good. We have been doing this successfully this week, and that is great because we need to be here representing the voice of the American people. However, I will tell you, during these 6 weeks when we weren't convening, there was a lot of work to be done too. Yet Congress was unable to do it. Why? Because, unlike probably the majority of the people whom I represent, we don't telework. We work, yes. We were home working hard. But we weren't involved in debates here. We weren't involved in hearings. We weren't involved in debates on the floor. We weren't involved in voting. During that time period of 6 weeks, by the way, over half a trillion was appropriated. In other words, this body chose to spend over half a trillion dollars--that used to be a lot of money--of taxpayers' money without people being here to weigh in, to vote, to have amendments, or to have debate. And that legislation had to be done because it had to do with helping small businesses in particular but also healthcare providers around the country and getting more testing, which was very important. But wouldn't it have been good had Congress been able to weigh in? But we couldn't. Why? We don't have the ability to remotely vote, much less engage in debate or much less have hearings. I think we should be able to do that. I think we should be able to meet and discuss things even when we can't physically be here in the Capitol.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am also here to talk today about the work that is being done to help my home State of Ohio to get through this coronavirus. It is a crisis in so many ways. It is a healthcare crisis, but it has also become an economic crisis and a family crisis. It is affecting everybody in ways that are truly heartbreaking for me to see in so many instances. I have talked to people who have been unemployed for the first time in their lives and have never had access to the unemployment insurance office. They have been fortunate. And now they have to. I have talked to people who started a small business and took a big risk to do that. They have five or six employees--it is a family-owned business--and they have been through the thick and thin over the years, but this one has really knocked them out. They have no income coming because they are in one of these businesses that by government order were shut down and cannot continue to serve the customers. I have talked to hospitals in a rural area of our State that cannot continue to operate. They have about a week left of cash reserves. Luckily, they are going to get some of this funding that Congress just provided with regard to the phase 3.5, as we are calling it, legislation of the CARES Act. But they are really hurting. They have had to lay off more than half of their hospital staff. They can't do elective surgery. They can't have the normal work they are used to because people aren't coming in to see the doctor. They aren't coming into the emergency room. The good news is, in Ohio and other States around the country, we are starting to open up and doing so safely. We are doing more testing and that is all good. It has been a tough time. Like so many Americans, I have been on the phone a lot. I have been on the phone pretty much all day, every day, into the night. A lot of what I have been doing is talking to constituents and talking to stakeholders across the State and hearing their concerns and trying to explain what we are doing here in Washington, how it would affect them and their families, and getting their input as to what we should do, but also I have been working with the White House, and HHS, FEMA, the FDA, Treasury, SBA, the Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. Trade Representative, State of Ohio, and others on corona-related matters to be able to help Ohio companies and help Ohio individuals. We have had some success in that. I am proud of that. In terms of constituents, we held seven tele-townhall meetings in the last 6 weeks where we hear directly from people, thousands of Ohioans. Again, there are a lot of heartbreaking stories and also a lot of really inspiring stories about people who stepped up and helped. One guy lost his job and decided to go volunteer at a food pantry. He wears the PPE, the mask and the gloves, and he delivers food to people who have never had to worry about food security before because they always had a job. Now, they don't have a job and are waiting to get their unemployment insurance, and they can't put food on the table. Some of them feel funny about going to a food pantry because they have never done that before. He makes them feel more at home, he said, and understanding and more welcomed. I talked to people who are delivering groceries to their neighbors who are seniors and who are more vulnerable. God bless them. I talked to people who are making homemade masks at home. I brought some with me on my trip to Washington. They are doing it as volunteers, not asking for anything other than, if you take this mask, you have to agree you are also going to be helping your neighbor. The frontline workers, the hospital workers, are putting their healthcare on the line for us. They are risking their own healthcare and the possibility of getting this virus to help all of us and to help our grandparents and our parents. God bless them. I love when the healthcare workers are being held up by everybody. I think today is official Nurses Day. We should all be thanking our healthcare professionals and, specifically today, our nurses for what they do every day in every time period, but particularly during this crisis, where they have been working really long hours and doing everything they can to try to protect us. I appreciate the people who are doing everything else on the frontlines right now, whether working in a grocery store stacking shelves or whether you are driving a truck. I drove my pickup truck from Ohio to Washington on Sunday to be here for this week, and every time I went by a truck, I said thank you just for being out there and delivering the food and delivering the products. We thank those folks for what they are doing, all of them. One thing I tried to do is to help in terms of explaining what is going on in getting input. We talked to more than a dozen groups out there. I talked to the Farm Bureau today in Ohio, but I also talked to the hospitals, small business owners, food banks, the nonprofits, and many others to hear how we can support them during this tough time. This afternoon, we had a telephone call with some of the largest businesses in Ohio, a group called the Ohio Business Roundtable. They talked about some of the things they are doing to keep their employees safe because some of them are essential businesses. I encouraged them, as I always do, to get your best practices out to all your others business associates. Let them know how we can reopen safely. We are starting to open in Ohio. We want to know it is safe. The best advice will not be from a piece of paper--as important as that guidance is from the White House or the State of Ohio--it is going to be from other businesses who found out things you can do, like stagger the lunch break. That helps to spread people out. These things might not be obvious, such as do the temperature testing as people come in. Be sure that you are doing everything you can do to explain to people what they can do if they feel like they are getting sick, who they can go to and how they can be sure that they are not infecting others. I think there is an opportunity here to reopen and do it safely. One reason we are able to reopen in Ohio safely is we have a lot more testing now. Like many States, we didn't have enough testing until recently. Now, we are getting it. We had 3,700 tests per day, 2 weeks ago. Within 2 or 3 weeks from today, we will have 20,000 tests per day, a 600 percent increase. We had to work at it because we were having trouble getting some of the components for testing, particularly the reagent. The State of Ohio, to its credit, with Governor DeWine, reached an agreement with Thermo Fisher, a private sector company taking the lead in providing us a guaranteed supply chain of this reagent under their tests, which enables us to dramatically respond to increasing our testing. We are getting to a point where you can have a lot more drive-through testing at Kroger and Walmart and some of our drug stores. We are starting to get the testing much easier for people because you can drive through. You don't have to get out of your car, and you feel safer. The saliva test, as opposed to a test where they take a swab deep into your nasal cavities, is a lot less intrusive, and that is starting to be used more. We are beginning to have enough testing where we can more safely say: Look, we are going to reopen, but we are going to test people a lot. If we find a problem, we are going to do the contact tracing to figure out who that person has been with and quarantine those people. That is less hard than quarantining everybody else. For all of us, really, testing is where there is a problem. We will get to a point where we can test people who are asymptomatic. Even if you don't have symptoms, you could be a carrier. I think dramatically increasing the testing is the key thing. This is a diagnostic test. There are also the immunity tests coming up, which is also helpful, but nothing replaces the diagnostic test which says whether you have it or don't. We also have seen good news in Ohio and around the country on these antiviral medications. That is the reason we can reopen safely, too. If someone does get coronavirus, they have a chance to take something like Tamiflu, which you take for the common flu. Remdesivir is the most recent one the FDA has approved, which has a record of being very helpful. People want to know, if they get the virus, that they can take something for it. That is helpful. Finally, we are getting our hands around the PPE issue, the personal protective equipment, the masks and gloves and the gowns. This evening, after this talk, I am going to be working with an Ohio company that is interested in dramatically expanding the gown production. That would be great. We are working with the White House and others to try to ensure that can happen. We have a lot of great world-class businesses in Ohio. What I am talking about tonight is an example of that. There are others, too, in healthcare systems that have contributed to this coronavirus crisis all over the country. I have been working the last 6 weeks with them, making sure they have the opportunity to do that. One of those key contributions from Ohio has been from a company called Battelle. Battelle is a global research institution and happens to be headquartered in Columbus, OH. They do awesome work all over the world. They run some of our national labs for the Energy Department. We worked with the Trump administration and with Ohio Governor Mike DeWine to help them get approval for a really innovative technology where they can take an N95 mask--one like this, except even better because it is N95--and they can recycle that mask. They decontaminate it. These masks can be recycled up to 20 times. Think about that, 20 times. It is groundbreaking because they have enough machines to spread out around the country. They have 60 machines that they can recycle and decontaminate between 4 and 5 million masks a day. I worked with FEMA, HHS, and the White House to help Battelle secure a contract with the Federal Government to be able to take their technology and machines and spread them initially to hot spots around the country like New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and now other places. I would tell people who might be listening that, if you are connected with a healthcare entity, a hospital, a nursing home, EMS, if you are a firefighter and you use these N95 masks, don't throw them away. When you are done with them, put them aside in a separate bin for recycling and get them picked up. We worked on a contract with the Federal Government to help with the pick-up and delivery, which is also available now. You can get them picked up and take them to Battelle. Hopefully, they have a cleaning station near you, and for free, you get a recycled mask back. The process takes about 8 hours. If you are close to one, you can get it overnight. We are not at full capacity on these machines. We should be. It is a great idea. Why spend the money to get some overpriced mask from China--because they are all overpriced now--when you can actually recycle what you have? It is a lot less medical waste, too. If you are interested in that, go to Battelle.org and learn more about it, or go to our website Portman.senate.gov, to find out more about it. Find out if there is a machine near you. Even if there is not, we can send them, and we can help you connect with companies, including Cardinal Health in Ohio, providing some of the logistics to get the masks back and forth. That is an example of some of the things we have been working on the past 6 weeks to help with this effort. I want to, again, as I have done before, commend the folks at Battelle for devoting their time and energy to this project. As soon as this coronavirus came up, they said to the engineers: Forget what you are doing, go work on this. They have also done a lot of testing with Ohio State, putting their folks against that, and now, they are working on other interesting technology that could be very helpful in detecting coronavirus. It is an example. We had another company, Cardinal Health, that I mentioned, that are helping in terms of the logistics. They did something else early on. They came to me and said: We have 2.3 million protective gowns in storage. We are not using them. They are the kind of gowns that can be used as isolation gowns. They are very effective. They are not qualified as surgical gowns, but they can be used as isolation gowns. They were willing to donate them to the National Stockpile. We worked with, again, FDA, HHS, and the White House to get through some of the red tape because it is tough to get things approved at times with the Federal Government. There are reasons for that. We want to be safe. We got approval for those gowns, and bingo, like that, they started to go out. They went to New York, they went to Detroit, they went to places where are there are hot spots. They are in the National Stockpile. They donated 2.3 million gowns. One company that has been very helpful to so many Americans is GoJo. It is a company that makes Purell. I see some up here on the desk. Purell is made in Ohio, outside of Akron. We are very proud of Purell. They have been going 24/7, producing all they can. It is tough to find it in the grocery store because, as soon as the shipment comes in, they take it and use it. It is particularly helpful now that they have Purell beginning to reopen. Reopening means doing things differently. It means wearing a mask when you are in proximity with somebody else. It means using Purell and washing your hands more often. It means being sure you are following the rules to be able to stay safe. Purell will continue to be needed. They had a problem because the Federal Government was assessing a 25- percent tariff on two critical items they had to have for the dispensers. At least one item had a patent in China. China had the patent on it. Things were coming in from China with a 25-percent tariff. We were able to go to a U.S. Trade Representative. I commend Bob Lighthizer, who is the Trade Rep, for working with us on this. For this period of time, they took that 25 percent off. They were having a tough time getting the supply and because it was increasing the costs by 25 percent. We were able to do that. Now. They are able to produce more of this Purell and more dispensers and do it less expensively By the way, this leads me to a comment on China. We need to pull back some of what we make in China and make it here. It is a pretty simple concept. It is harder to implement because our supply chains are global and they are complex. Who would have thought that, on a GoJo dispenser for Purell, there would be a Chinese patented product, but there is. Whether it is gowns,--most of which are made in China--or masks or other products like something essential that is in a hand sanitizer dispenser, we have to pull those products back. I think the way to do it isn't to beat up on China, but rather to provide the incentive--the carrot--to American companies and other companies and say, Make it here, make it in America. I think we can do that as a group, Republicans and Democrats alike. I think there is consensus now that we should do more to reshore, and in some cases, shore for the first time, products that have been moved overseas and particularly to China. We wouldn't have had to get that special permission on the 25-percent tariff if it was made here. We also worked with the FDA to get approval for a company called Second Breath in Cleveland, OH. It is another great example. There are so many in Ohio, but this is a company that didn't make ventilators at all. It is a consortium of several manufacturing companies that work together. But again, early on in this crisis, they said: We need ventilators. We can do that. We are manufacturers. We are Ohioans. We are inventors. They went out and made these ventilators on their own that were then tested at three different Ohio hospitals. The medical community loved them. They are relatively inexpensive, relatively simple, and very effective. Again, the FDA had to go through its process. My job is not to say to the FDA, You need to approve this. My job was to ask them to please expedite this process so, if it can be approved, we can get this out to people who are literally dying and need the ventilators. To the FDA's credit, Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, in particular, worked with us and got that product approved. They already made a bunch of them. They weren't going to send them out if they didn't get approval. They didn't care because they were willing to take a loss, with the opportunity to save people. Now, those ventilators have gone out to stockpiles and hospitals, including New York, when they needed them all over the country. It is an example of the kinds of things over the last 6 weeks we have been able to do in Ohio. The result is companies in Ohio are now making swabs, making masks, making face shields, making hand sanitizer. Proctor and Gamble converted some of their perfume-making factory to making hand sanitizer. It probably smells pretty good. I don't know if it actually has a particular odor to it. If it comes from a perfume factory, it might not just be effective, but smell pretty good, too. Thanks to Proctor and Gamble and all these companies that are willing to step up and do these things they have never done before and respond to these crisis--that is what Americans do. We get knocked down; we figure it out. We get back on our feet. Ultimately, I am optimistic. Think about what has happened in the last couple of weeks. There is substantially new testing. In my own State of Ohio, again, a 600-percent increase of tests from 2 weeks to 3 weeks from now. Increasingly, new antiviral medication has been approved. It is something people can rely on--more testing and antiviral medication is critical. There are more PPEs. Finally, we are figuring it out, like the recycling which we can do right here in America. We can recycle our own masks. There are the gowns we are trying to get produced more here in America right now. We are starting to catch up on things that, frankly, we were pretty far behind in. On the testing, I will tell you that, for the first few weeks of this crisis, you couldn't get a test in most parts of Ohio unless you were so severely ill that you had to be hospitalized. That was wrong. We just weren't prepared as a country. By the way, the last administration wouldn't have been any more prepared, nor would the previous administration, which I served, have been any more prepared. We were not expecting a pandemic like this. We should have been, of course. There were some warnings. The country now will be prepared. One thing we are doing is we are adding to that stockpile with the PPE, with the ventilators, and obviously with the antiviral medications for this virus and the vaccine for this virus. My hope is that vaccine, which the administration calls their process warp speed--and I appreciate that they are working around the clock. There are some scientists who have devoted their lives to this now. That is all they are doing. And God bless them, and there are a bunch of them. And, by the way, some of these vaccines will not work. People will have spent hundreds of millions of dollars--even billions of dollars--on stuff that is not going to work. But kind of like those ventilators were made even though they didn't know if they were going to get approval or not, we want to have that virus vaccine ready. If it does work and it gets approval, we want to have lots of doses of it already made. So there is going to be some money spent, including by the Federal taxpayer, but that is OK to ensure that we end up with something that really can be effective. On the testing, I will tell you that in my own hometown of Cincinnati, OH, those first few weeks we really couldn't get tested unless you were to be hospitalized. And we had an interesting issue there, again, showing how Washington sometimes can make things a little slower. The University of Cincinnati, which is our primary academic medical center in southern Ohio, had ordered a testing machine back in February. They ordered it because they knew this was coming, and they wanted to get the best of the best. So it was a high-quality machine, with high accuracy, and it could do 1,000 tests a day. By the way, at the time, they were doing about 80 to 100 tests a day in their own little lab, but they needed this equipment, and they had a contract for it back in February. Well, come March they kept hearing next week, next week, next week, and they called me and I got involved. I got to the company and got to the University of Cincinnati and said: What is the real problem here? And they said: Well, we are being told by the Federal Government that we can't deliver it to Cincinnati. It needs to go somewhere else. I said: Well, they contracted for this back in February, and we are desperate for testing. We may not be a hotspot right now, but we are going to be unless we get some testing. So, again, we broke through the redtape and broke through what was some miscommunication. It turned out, with the help of the White House, that we got the approval to get the diagnostic tests there that had already been contracted for. It is called a cobas 6800 machine. It can process more than 1,000 diagnostic tests per day, and it is working. It is every day giving more people the sense of security that they know whether they have this or not, and they know whether the person that works in the store has it or not, and they know that we have more access to testing. Now, I am not saying we are getting there, but that would be key to getting us back to business but also reopening in a way that we don't have to stop if there is an outbreak because we will have the testing to be able to really throw at it and then the contact tracing and be able to ensure that we can stop the spread of the virus. So those are some of the things that we have worked on. We have worked with FEMA to unlock additional resources for Ohio, and that has happened around the country. USDA has now allowed the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services to operate the Disaster Household Distribution Program. We appreciate them. We worked with them on that so that we can officially get meals to food banks and families in Ohio. We worked with the Department of Veterans Affairs to ensure that veterans could get an extension on their filing of claims and appeals during this time period for veterans' compensation benefits and other benefits during a time when the VA offices have been closed. We helped stop the Federal Bureau of Prisons from sending more prisoners to one of our hotspots. It is a really sad case, the Elkton Federal prison in Ohio. We also helped them bring more healthcare to the Elkton prison. Frankly, I am discouraged that they aren't doing more testing there. I talk to them constantly, and they are providing more testing, but not enough--not enough. I think it is inexcusable I think, in a situation like a nursing home or a prison, we should be focused on getting the testing in there. These are what they call congregant living situations. In this case it is a low-security prison. So it is more like dormitory-type style living, and, unfortunately, if they were to test as much as they should, I believe they would find out, as we found out in other State prisons in Ohio, that more than half the prisoners there are carrying the virus, and you have got to separate those people out from those who don't have it and do much more treating and tracing. But we have made progress there, and we will continue to. The phase 3.5 rescue package we passed a few weeks ago does have funding for the PPP program, which is for small businesses, to be able to keep their employees and keep their doors open. It also has funding for healthcare. But the piece that hasn't gotten much attention and may be the most important aspect of the bill of all is $25 billion in the bill for more testing. Again, I am a broken record here on testing, but that money is so important, and we are using it in Ohio right now. About $43 million has come to Ohio recently, I am told, and that funding will be helpful not just to ensure that we have testing, but do we have enough testing so that we will get a sense of what is going on in terms of the healthcare crisis, and then, when there is a hotspot, address it again immediately and be able to stop the spread of the virus? It is so important to us reopening and getting people back to work, back to their churches and other places of worship, and back to school. We need to get back to a normal life, and we can, and we will. We will figure this out, but we do need the help of having the necessary testing capacity, diagnostic testing, and then it is also helpful to have the antibody test so you know whether you have developed an immunity or not. But those are both needed. You can't do it just with the antibody test. You have to also know through the diagnostic test whether someone has the disease or not to be able to pull that person out of a situation where he or she is with others and to find out whom they have been in touch with and do the contact tracing, and, again, quarantining those people, not quarantining everybody else. That is the effective way to do it. Congress has now passed four of these legislative measures in an overwhelming, bipartisan fashion. It is a lot of money. About $3 trillion have gone out the door from Federal taxpayers. I hope we can continue to be bipartisan. I hope we can work together to figure out how to move forward. In my view, moving forward means looking at what we have done carefully. Let's not start to legislate again and spend more money until we know how what we have already sent works. The money is just being distributed now. In fact, most of our money in Ohio that goes to the State and local governments has not been distributed yet. Let's get that money out. By the way, they need it. They need it badly. They need it to pay police and fire and EMS. Our cities in Ohio are really hurting because they depend so much on income taxes, on earnings taxes. Other cities in America don't because they can't, but about four of the top five cities in America that were most affected by the reduction in revenue from the coronavirus are in Ohio--Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Toledo. So they have a real problem on their hands. I strongly urge the Department of Treasury to loosen up their requirements to allow that State and local funding to be used more flexibly, specifically for payroll, for public safety. Based on Monday's guidance that we just got a couple of days ago here, they can now do that. That is just guidance. It is not legislation. I would love in whatever we do going forward to get that in legislation, to say: Let's provide flexibility to the States but also to these municipalities. I will tell you that in my home State of Ohio, again, at the municipal level, we are really hurting. Budgets are being slashed because the revenue is not coming in because it is based on the economy. Most cities rely heavily on property tax. We don't. Property tax has not been affected in the way that income tax has or sales tax. So we do need to pay attention to this, and people say: Well, we shouldn't send in more money to municipalities. Let's start with flexibility. Let them use the money they have more effectively for what they actually need. I don't want a situation where you have a 30-percent or 40-percent cut in police, which is what is happening in some of our municipalities, to affect the public safety of our communities at a time like this. Police officers need to be on the street doing their jobs. God bless them. They are out there. We need them. As for EMS personnel, if your grandmother needs to be rushed to the hospital, you want the EMS to come. You don't want to have a 40-percent cut in their services. So we do have to deal with this issue and be sure to provide flexibility is the first step. And let's codify that by statute and make sure it is clear, not just guidance that doesn't seem to be consistent with the underlying law, because the underlying law says it has to be directly related to the COVID-19, and some of this is not. You need police officers on the street whether you had COVID-19 or not. So let's be sure we codify that and then let's see what is needed. But I also think that in this next legislation we also have to be sure that we are not just looking at what has already passed but looking ahead. And looking ahead means the ability to reopen, and that means stimulating the economy and creating--whether it is tax relief or whether it is smart investment in infrastructure. Let's say the projects that are already on the books in my State and yours, projects that are already shovel-ready because they are ready to go, they have gone through the merit-based process in our States, but many of those projects will not be able to be funded this year by our States. Why? Because their revenues have collapsed, particularly their gas taxes have collapsed. So the State match, which is based on the amount of gas you buy, has gone down because people aren't driving nearly as much. What if we picked up some of that at the Federal level? These are good projects because they aren't bridges to nowhere. They have been through the merit-based process, and they are ready to go. That is an idea. Why? It is good jobs, one, which are needed right now, and good benefits, but also it is economic benefit. Those dollars will come back in terms of improved roads and bridges and ports and airports. Rural broadband would really help right now. As people are telelearning and teleworking more and more, they are finding out: Oh, my gosh, there are big parts of our country that don't have broadband access, can't get Wi-Fi, and if you can, it is way too slow. Again, talking to the Farm Bureau today, you would think they would be talking about the price of corn and soybeans, and they were, and the huge issues we have right now in the beef industry and the pork industry and poultry, but they were also talking about: I got my kids at home and we can't do the homework because we can't get broadband in a lot of parts of Ohio--probably in about a third of our State. Ohio is not viewed as a State that has huge, sparsely populated rural areas, but we have enough, and we have a real lack of access to broadband to be able even to do schoolwork, much less to start a small business. So this is another area where we can provide some help for that here, and it would come back in terms of increased dollars from having more economic development in some of these rural areas. So I think there are some things we need to do there as well. There has been a lot of discussion about this issue of liability protection. Let me tell you my perspective on this. It is very simple. This should not be a partisan issue. I mean, we should not want these hospitals and these schools and these small businesses and anybody to be able to be sued for something that was totally out of their control. This is not something anybody should be blamed for, certainly in this country. We know where it started, in Hubei Province, in Wuhan, China. But as for the fact that this has come over here and people are affected by it, let's not have a trial lawyer bonanza here because that will result in people not getting back to work. It will result in more costs for our universities. I understand some of them are being sued right now because they have students who are telelearning. Well, yes, it is not their fault. You can't bring students together right now in the dormitories. It is not safe. I know there is, again, kind of a partisan nature to this. It shouldn't be partisan at all. We should all want people to go back to work, to be able to go back to school, to be able to access the healthcare system. I also think that for my colleagues on my side of the aisle who might want to make this broader than the coronavirus, let's keep it to the coronavirus, and I think that is what people intend. Let's keep it to COVID-19, and let's provide the kind of protections--sensible protections--that are necessary to be able to allow people to get back to a normal life. People say: Well, things are going to be so different now in America. They will be different. We will be more cautious. You know, we will probably, therefore, have a less drastic flu season too because we will be more careful. With this pandemic, you know, we don't know if it is going to come back again like it did a couple of months ago. Will it come back again in the fall or the winter like that, but we have to be prepared for that. So life will not be exactly the same. There is no question about it. There will be some things that will be different, too. There will be more teleworking because it is has worked well. It is cost effective, and it is efficient. There will be more telemedicine because it has worked well. I have talked to a number of doctors who were actually very pleased with some of the things they have been able to do remotely. I hope we will have a Congress that works more remotely so when we are on our recesses, as we do every August, and as we do periodically, that we could have remote hearings on a more regular basis because it is great information. But, ultimately, I think our country will get back on track. Again, we, as Americans, when we get knocked down, we get back up on our feet, and that is what we will do. And we will have again not just the greatest economy on the face of the Earth, but we again will be that beacon of hope and opportunities for the rest of the world. People will again look at America and say: I want to be like that. And we will be able to show that and how we get back on our feet and how we get back to a more normal life, and, once again, the greatest country on the face of this Earth will be able to once again be able to show the world an ideal for everyone to aspire to.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, our economy is in a free fall. I just got off the phone with another business in Ohio that was worried about whether they can survive, whether or not they can keep the workers they have, and looking to us to try to pass something that would actually help. The bill before us does that. Yet here we are. Another day has gone by. More people have lost their jobs. More small businesses have shuttered. The healthcare crisis continues. The coronavirus is spreading, and we are not passing legislation that addresses all of those issues. I ask my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to work with us. Let's come up with a bill here today. The bill was the result of a bipartisan process. I was part of it. So I can tell you that. There were four different task forces that were asked to deal with four different parts of the response to the coronavirus. Each one was bipartisan. In our case, there were two Republicans and two Democrats. The administration was involved. We made concessions. The Democrats made concessions. The legislation represented that. There were ideas from both sides. Yet here we are, 48 hours after the bill was introduced. We had hoped to have the bill signed into law by the President on Monday. I had businesses calling me yesterday saying: I am holding on because I was told this was going to be done by Monday. My hope is that those meetings that are happening behind those closed doors over there result in something quickly and that Democrats don't keep trying to add more things to this bill that are extraneous and that don't have to do with the coronavirus. This is not the time to try to get whatever your wish list is on a piece of legislation that is moving. These are not normal times here, where Members try to take advantage of the bill going through by adding something to it. It is also not a time to say: Let's spend more and more and more on everything. This is unprecedented. The total spending in this bill will be about $1.5 trillion. That is roughly the size of the entire appropriations that Congress normally makes. The entire appropriations that come through the process here, called discretionary spending, is the amount of just one coronavirus emergency bill. To me, it is a rescue package. It is a rescue package that does three things. No. 1, it tries to keep the doors open in those small businesses that are watching us so carefully right now to see what is going to happen. Also, as part of keeping the doors open, it means that you can keep your employees. So goal one is to keep employees attached to businesses. We should all want that. That is where most people get their healthcare and get their retirement. That is where we want employees to be as we get over the hump here and begin to control this virus. Then we want to go back to work. We want to get the economy moving again so people can have paychecks and our economy can grow again. No. 2, we do want to take care of those people who, through no fault of their own, have found themselves out of work. Sadly, in my home State of Ohio and around the country, there are a lot of people in that category. Our unemployment insurance system is overwhelmed right now. This past week, compared to a week ago, we had a twentyfold increase. That is a 2,000-percent increase in the number of people who were applying for unemployment insurance. Our claims have skyrocketed. It has overwhelmed the system. That is happening all over the country. We want to take care of those people. And, No. 3, this legislation does what is perhaps the most important thing, which is that it addresses the problems in our public healthcare system that have resulted in this response to coronavirus not being as strong as we would like it. Think about more masks and more gowns and protective equipment. Think about the anti-viral medication people can take--like for the flu, you can take Tamiflu. We need the anti-viral there to give people some comfort. Think about the fact that we don't have enough tests out there, still. Yes, it has improved, and it is improving every day, but we don't have enough tests. People who are asymptomatic ought to be able to get tests. If they are positive, then we ought to be able to trace it. That is what they did in South Korea. That is what they did in Japan. That is what they have done in other countries to try to get control of this. So that is all in this legislation. Until we solve the healthcare part of it--that last part, that third part--we are going to continue to have problems in terms of the economic free fall. We can't spend enough money to stop what is happening in terms of this economic issue unless we deal with the healthcare part of this. I think we are starting to make progress. But do you know what? We need the funding now so that the Centers for Disease Control, so that the States, so that the State departments of public health, and so that the county departments of public health can get to the point where they know who has this, they can trace it, and they can tell us with certainty whether we are making progress or not. One thing this bill will let us do is to develop those metrics so that you and I and everybody every day can see what the status is and how many new cases have been open that day. If we have this information from better testing, from better information flow, from the funding that is in this bill, including billions of dollars going to the Centers for Disease Control and back to the States, then we will be able to have some way to measure our success and eventually be able to say we are making progress and we have actually reversed the trend. Only then will moms and dads feel safe having their kids go back to school. Only then will workers feel like it is safe to go back to work. Only then will restaurants be able to reopen and have people coming in to take advantage of that hospitality. Only then will the theaters be able to open up and the bowling alleys. This is in this legislation also, in the first two we talked about, helping to keep employees at work and keeping the doors open for small businesses. Please, let's pass this right away, because there are doors closing as we talk. Every minute we are here arguing over stuff, some of which has nothing to do with the coronavirus, means another business is shut down and another group of employees is let go. This legislation says, if you are a small business, you can get a loan from your bank to keep the doors open. And the loan effectively converts to a grant, meaning that you don't have to pay it back if you use the loan to make your payroll, to keep people, to pay your rent, or to pay your mortgage. This is new. It is innovative. It is something that small businesses are excited about, but we have to pass the legislation to make it happen. This is $350 billion. And, again, there is total forgiveness of that loan if you use it for these purposes to keep your employees. Please, let's get this passed right away. It is going to take a little while for these programs to get in place. That is all the more reason for us not to wait another day or even another hour. Second, for larger businesses, there is this new fund called the Exchange Stabilization Fund. That is to help companies that can't get a loan from a bank, to be able to get help from the Treasury and the Fed to provide money for liquidity so they can stay in business. They may have little or no cash flow, but they are looking for a loan to be able to stay afloat. These loans don't have to be paid back. Should there be accountability for these loans? Of course. Republicans are for accountability. That is fine. But let's get moving on this. It is under this provision that there will be special help for certain industries: the national security industry and the airlines. Republicans are for that, but let's make sure that this is not a giveaway and make sure there is an opportunity for the shareholders, who are the taxpayers of our country, to be able to get their money back, just like shareholders would want to in another business kind of commercial loan. That is all we are asking for. The final thing is that, under this legislation, there is significant help for these companies to be able to keep their doors open--small, medium, and large--through some tax incentives that provide more liquidity during this year, 2020. One of the important points there is that if you do have payroll--and most of these companies still do--you don't have to pay your payroll taxes during 2020. So you defer your payroll taxes until next year or the year after. Companies care a lot about that. They tell me that is very important to them. That lowers their expenses, lets them keep people, and lets them stay in business. Yet they have to pay them back over time. So for the taxpayers, it is a good deal. There is also an opportunity here to help people directly. That is in this legislation. That is the second goal. The first goal is to keep the doors open and keep the employees at work. The second goal is to help people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves unemployed, some for the first time in their lives. I have friends at home I know who have been let go. They work in the retail business or in the hospitality business. There is just no business. They have never been to an unemployment insurance office. They never had to. Now they have to. So, yes, this legislation does include a little help for them in two ways. One, unemployment insurance is bumped up from the Federal Government. So every State in the country is going to have the ability to be sure that people who come and want to get on unemployment have the ability--maybe not to match their salary entirely, not total wage replacement, but for low-income workers, yes. And for others there will be at least enough money to be able to put food on the table, maybe to pay the rent, and maybe to make the car payment during this period. It is a short-term proposal. It is 3 months, but it is really important. It is a safety net, the unemployment insurance. And then, second, there is a direct payment. Perhaps you have heard about that. I think it is $1,200 per person, $2,400 for a joint filer or for a couple, and then $500 per child. Why is that important? Because people need some cash right now. Some people are not going to be able to get on the unemployment insurance system for a while because it takes a little while to process that. But they will have the ability, because the IRS will be sending these checks out quickly, to be able to have a little help, a little cushion. So this bill has all of that. This bill is there to help people. This bill is there to ensure that doors can stay open in these businesses and people can stay employed, to the extent possible. Let's not block it anymore. People said: Well, there is not enough money in here. That is really what Democrats wanted, to put more money in the bill. There is already $75 billion straight to hospitals, and then I would argue at least another $40 billion going to hospitals directly or indirectly through Medicare reimbursements and through other changes in the law that help. That used to be a lot of money around here. My point is, if that is not enough, in a few weeks Congress will be back. We can look at this. We will need to fine-tune this. But don't block the bill today because it is not enough money for whatever you think your needs are. We don't know what the needs are. Let's be honest. What we do know is this is an unprecedented amount of money. Congress has never passed a rescue package like this before--$1.5 trillion, on top of about $200 billion that was in the legislation that passed only a couple of weeks ago, on top of the $8.3 billion that was in the first one. This is phase 3. Then, finally, No. 3, this legislation does provide the help to the healthcare system, particularly the public healthcare system, to be able to provide the protective gear that is needed for our healthcare workers, the additional ventilators and respirators that are needed in our hospitals, the antiviral medication that can help when someone tests positive to know there is going to be a way to minimize, to reduce the effects of this virus and the infection. Then, really significantly, to not only increase the testing--and, today, LabCorp and Quest said that they can now do 300,000 tests a week. We need to use the cotton swabs. We need to get them the swabs. There needs to be a process there to get them, but now we are finally starting to come online. This legislation provides funding to help move that more quickly, to get it going so that we can have the information to be able to measure whether we are succeeding or not; then, as we begin to measure our success, to be able to get people back to work, to be able to get the economy back on track, to be able to ensure people are out there again shopping. The consumer economy is so important. This can all happen, but this legislation is critical to making it happen, to providing the rescue to help people weather the storm and to ensure that, at the other end of this, we come out strong. And we will. We will. But it requires us working together today, right now, to come out from behind these doors, stop the negotiating to add more here and there, and just say this is a bipartisan product. Nothing is perfect around here, but if you make perfect the enemy of the good, you are going to hurt more people. More small businesses will shut; more people will be out on their own; and there will be more and more people who will be infected with this virus who otherwise could have been saved. So I ask my colleagues--it has already been too long--let's pass this legislation today. Let's begin the rescue package and begin to help the constituents who deserve it. I yield the floor

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

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, reclaiming my time, that is added to the absolutely inaccurate descriptions I have heard from the other side as to what is in this legislation. In other words, they are blocking us from moving forward, creating the procedural hurdles that the majority leader just talked about, but also doing so by telling the American people, for instance, there is not enough in here for small businesses. My gosh, this is an unprecedented program for small businesses, something we have never done before. We are telling businesses: If you are paying your employees to stay there, you not only get a loan, you get a grant They say there was not enough in here to help people who are falling between the cracks. It is an unprecedented unemployment insurance system that we are setting up here. By the way, if you look at the unemployment insurance side, look at it this way. What we are saying is that we want to increase by eight times the cost of the national unemployment insurance system. That is how I look at it. It is an additional $600 per week, per person. It is a broader employment system because we are going to bring in people who are self-employed, people who run the gig economy--something that we should be doing as a matter of reform, perhaps, but in this case we have to do it. These people are hurting too. This is unprecedented to provide people who are low- and moderate-income Americans the ability to have wage replacement through unemployment insurance. That has never been done before. That is in this legislation. This is a rescue package. It is to help people weather the storm. It is to ensure that we have the ability to say to the people who are calling us and saying ``Please help us'' that help is on the way. Are we going to solve every problem in this one bill? No, although $1.8 trillion goes a long way toward solving the problem. But we will be back here again. We will be back here to ensure that we can fine- tune this legislation. And if we need to react to other challenges, we have to do that because our constituents need it. This is a crisis. But in the meantime, let's pass this legislation. It does help small businesses and keep people at work. It does protect those workers who lose their job through no fault of their own. It does take our healthcare system, which is under such tremendous stress, and improve it in every respect to deal with this coronavirus, to slow the spread and ensure that we can tell the American people: Not only are you going to be safer and healthier if this legislation passes, but guess what, you have a fair chance of keeping your job and being able to take care of your family. With that, I yield to my colleague.

Mr. PORTMAN. I will yield.

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Wyoming, and I think he has made it very clear what is at stake here. We are in a crisis. Our economy is in a free fall. The people we represent and families are suffering. The healthcare system is under tremendous stress. I spent the morning on the phone, talking to Ohioans and small business owners, people who are out of a job and worried and nervous. We all know somebody who has lost a job. We all know somebody who has tested positive for this virus. Some of us, including me, know somebody who has died from the coronavirus. We need to pull together as Republicans and Democrats, as Americans, and address this crisis. I got to listen this afternoon to colleagues of mine on the other side of the aisle talk about the legislation that is before us, and I have to tell you, it was like they were talking about another bill, not the one that we actually are asking Democrats to allow us to vote on. The one we are asking them to allow us to vote on is the product of a bipartisan process. The majority leader set up five different task forces. Each task force is represented by Republicans and Democrats. I was in one of them--two Republicans and two Democrats. We sat down, and we hammered out details. We took Democratic ideas, and they are represented in the legislation. This process we have gone through--very different, by the way, from what happened in the House with regard to the first bill. We got an $8.3 billion healthcare bill. We also had a phase 2 bill, which is about $200 billion, that provided free testing and health insurance and healthcare and paid leave. Now we have this bill that is $1.8 trillion--$1.8 trillion. That is about as big as our entire domestic discretionary spending, which we approve here every year. Yet Democrats are saying that it is not enough money. So the most charitable way to describe what the Democrats are asking for now--although Senator Barrasso did a good job of laying out some of the outrageous demands that have come up that have nothing to do with coronavirus--but the most charitable way to say it is that they want more money. They want more money for States. They want more money for hospitals. They want more money for so many things. Guess what. There is $1.8 trillion in this bill, including billions of dollars--hundreds of billions of dollars--for those purposes. If we find out in 3 weeks, in 6 weeks, or in 2 months we need to do more, we will. But that is not an excuse for stopping the progress of this legislation now when it is so badly needed. One of the calls I got this morning was from a small business owner. Do you know what he said to me? He said the same thing I am sure all of my colleagues are hearing, which is this: I am watching; I am waiting; I don't want to pull the trigger and let my employees go. I started this business. I started it from scratch, and now I have to see the prospect of these people, whom I know and love, losing their jobs. I am waiting. I am waiting to see what you do today. The country is waiting. The markets are waiting. People are hurting. They are suffering, but they are waiting to see if we can get our act together and actually come up with something that helps them. And do you know what? This legislation does exactly what all of us, I thought, wanted to do. There are three things it does. One, it helps keep people at work. We want people to stay with their employer, have a job, have their healthcare, and have their retirement. Two, it helps workers who, through no fault of their own, lose their jobs. This legislation does that. And, three, let's get this healthcare crisis under control. Let's slow the spread of the coronavirus. All three of those things are precisely what is in this legislation. Last night, I went through in detail and described every detail of how it addresses that and where the bipartisan ideas came from. I won't do that now because I see the majority leader on the floor, and I want him to have an opportunity to speak. But I will tell you, those three objectives are in this legislation--specifically laid out in this legislation. On the healthcare side, which is so important, we need more masks; we need more gowns; we need more ventilators; we need more respirators; and we need to have more testing and a system to track that. That is in this legislation. There is over $4 billion to CDC to do exactly that. We need to have some data, some metrics, some measurements to know how we are doing and to be able to get out of this crisis because, until we deal with the healthcare crisis, we will continue to have this failure of our economic system because we are letting people down right now.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. I say to the Senator, I appreciate your yielding for a question. It is not really a question but a comment to thank you for your support of this on the other side of the aisle. This is a bipartisan effort to ensure that we can be able to do our duty. As the legislative branch, article I, we have responsibilities here. This is our duty station. Yet, if we cannot be here, we still need to be able to do it remotely. And with the technology that we now have, we have the ability to do that, as my colleague from Illinois said, in a safe and secure way. So I thank him for his advocacy of this. My hope is that we can have this as a possibility, should we not be able to gather. I think what has happened in the last several hours, as we learned about our colleagues who are self-quarantining, one who tested positive, as I understand it, it is very important that we have that ability. So I thank my colleague. I yield back

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, we not only can and should; we must. We must pass this legislation. I was very disappointed to see that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle chose to vote no on even the ability to move forward with debating this legislation tonight. To my colleague, the Democratic leader, who said this is a highly partisan bill, that is just not the case. Let's put the partisanship aside. Let's do what is best for the American people. I will tell you that over the past several days, through a bipartisan process, we sat down, Democrat and Republican, in four different task forces, and we put together the elements of this legislation. As a result, the bill before you tonight, the one we are talking about, reflects Republican priorities and Democratic priorities. I am going to take the time to walk through it and to talk about some of those so people understand what is in this legislation. I was pleased to see the Democratic leader say at the end that he believes we can figure this out over the next several hours. He said 24 hours. I hope it is not 24 hours. We need to move and move quickly. We see what the markets are doing globally. We know what the markets are going to do here. We have seen what the futures are. More importantly, we see the impact in our States, among our citizens. The Democratic leader says more money needs to be put against hospitals and States and workers. There is an unprecedented amount of money for all three of those in this legislation--unprecedented--and necessary, by the way, because we are in a crisis. But to say there is nothing here that helps hospitals, oh my gosh--I am going to talk about this with specificity. But $100 billion--$100 billion--is a pretty good start, and $75 billion of which goes to hospitals. To say there is nothing for workers--the unemployment insurance provisions in here comes from the Democratic side of the aisle. It is the most generous unemployment insurance plus-up by far ever in the history of our country. It actually adds more money to unemployment insurance than the current system has. By the way, it adds eight times more funding into the unemployment system for the rest of this year than is currently being spent. Think about that. That is not generous? By the way, we Republicans also agree that those who lose their jobs through no fault of their own should be able to get a generous unemployment check while we work through this coronavirus and get our economy back up and going again. Let me walk through some of this. This coronavirus is something that is urgent for us to address. It has closed businesses. It has closed schools. It has changed every aspect of our daily lives. It has left us uncertain, and for many Americans it has left them isolated--literally, self-isolated. It has put tremendous strain on our healthcare system and that is why this legislation addresses that. Our amazing first responders, our EMS, and our police officers are doing their part, as well as our physicians, our nurses, and other medical professionals who are on the frontlines combating this disease. God bless them. It has also done great damage to what was a strong and growing economy. Only a few weeks ago, we had unemployment numbers that were at a 50-year low. We had 18 straight months of employment increases and over 3-percent wage growth every month. But now--now--we see businesses shuttering. We see thousands and now millions of Americans unemployed through no fault of their own. The purpose of this legislation is to allow people to get back on their feet, to allow us to get back to normalcy. Extraordinary times like this require us to unify us as a country, and I see it in my home State of Ohio and around the country. Everybody has a role to play. Everybody needs to be practicing social distancing, as they call it, being safe, washing your hands frequently, using hand sanitizer--all part of the strategy of flattening the curve, as you have seen when you see Dr. Fauci and others giving presentations. It is to reduce our own exposure so that we don't overwhelm our Nation's public health system. We can all play a role in this, and in the end that would help save lives of our family members, of our neighbors, of our friends, of people we may never meet but we come in contact with, and the most vulnerable in our society. If we follow the guidelines put out by the Centers for Disease Control--the CDC guidelines--we are going to be safer. We are going to save lives. It all depends on all of us doing that, but it also depends on what we do here in the U.S. Congress, both in slowing the spread through the legislative efforts I will talk about tonight but also in getting this economy back on its feet so that people can get back to work and get a paycheck and begin to make ends meet. In Ohio we have been taking the lead on this. We have been pretty aggressive at saying that people need social distance and restaurants and bars need to close. We were one of the first couple of States to say that schools needed to be closed. Governor Mike DeWine and our Ohio Department of Health Director, Dr. Amy Acton, have done a good job in responding to this unprecedented crisis. As of this morning, we have 247 confirmed cases and 3 deaths. By the way, the first person to die in Ohio was a man I know. I knew him and I respected him. His name is Mark Wagner, Sr., of Toledo, OH. He contracted this disease and succumbed to it. Unfortunately, we are going to see more cases and more deaths, but we are doing the things to contain this and to begin to slow the spread, and that needs to happen at every level, including here. That is why this legislation is so important to pass tonight. Two weeks ago, Congress started this effort by passing the first major relief effort, called phase 1, which was $8.3 billion to address the healthcare needs associated with this pandemic. Ohio has already received $15.5 million from that first phase 1 legislation. Of course, much more needed to be done. One way we can find out what needs to be done is by listening to the people who have been most affected by it, and we have been doing that. I was joined by an infectious disease expert from the University of Cincinnati, Dr. George Smulian, on a Facebook Live townhall last week, so that we could answer questions from Ohioans about this crisis. He told us what the healthcare system needs. We know what it needs, and we are responding through this legislation. Last week, I hosted conference calls, while I was here in Washington, with a number of heavily impacted groups, including the hospitals in Ohio and a number of healthcare providers, with our food banks, with small business owners, with workers of nonprofits, and the charities out there on the frontlines doing all they can to help. We spoke to employers of all sizes. We had conference calls with hotels and restaurants and more. Hearing directly from these stakeholders helped us understand what the needs are, and this legislation reflects what the needs are in our communities. We have to continue to listen to people because things are changing, and as there is an evolving threat out there, Congress needs to be evolving as well. Last week, we passed a second major bill called the phase 2 package, which provides Federal funds to individuals exposed to the virus to get healthy. As an example, if you want to get tested for the virus, that is now free. Our hospitals needed more resources to combat the health crisis. So we provided more care--more funding--for our healthcare network. I am glad the President signed that bill immediately into law. We also provided resources to State Medicaid Programs, to shore up hospitals concerned about losing revenue, with no elective surgeries anymore, and concerned about being overwhelmed by an influx of individuals suffering from the virus. Phase 2 also provided needed help in terms of masks, gowns, and other protective gear, and more funding for the antiviral therapies that are coming. That is incredibly important--that people know that if they get this virus, they could have something like Tamiflu for the regular flu. That gives them a lot of reassurance and comfort, and it is necessary to protect the health of our citizens. That phase 2 legislation also puts more money into getting the vaccine as quickly as possible. It is not going to be here soon. It takes a while to get a vaccine going, but it will be done at an unprecedented speed because of the funding we are putting into it. It also provides for expansion of emergency food assistance, including for children who rely on free or reduced lunch from their school cafeterias who no longer have access to those meals. It also provides paid sick leave and family leave benefits of someone who had to leave work because of the coronavirus and who now knows they can still pay their bills. Most importantly, this paid leave is provided 100 percent from the Federal Government, dollar for dollar, not on the small businesses. That is very important. Larger businesses tend to have paid leave, but now we have a way for everybody under 500 employees to be able to get that paid leave through the Federal Government reimbursement. It is good we acted on phase 1 and phase 2, as I have talked about, but it is clearly not enough. Things haven't gotten better in the meantime in the last few days. They have gotten worse. A lot more has to be done to contain this virus and to help people weather the storm in the meantime. The crisis is unprecedented. In the best interest of public health, we effectively have chosen to pump the brakes on the economy. We decided to do that for our country because it is in the best interest of public health. That means businesses of all sizes--small, medium, and large--are having to either shutter their doors or slow down their production, letting people go. So many parts of our economy now are feeling the pain of this slowdown. Applications for unemployment in Ohio this week, as compared to last week, increased twentyfold. That means there was a 2,000-percent increase in Ohio on claims for unemployment. Obviously, that is overwhelming the system. I have worked with my colleagues nonstop over the past 3 days to put together this phase 3 package that will provide some relief to the millions of American workers and small businesses that have made our country and our economy the strongest in the world. Our goals are simple. First, slow the spread of the virus. Again, if that doesn't happen, people's health is at risk, and the negative economic impact that is hurting so many families will continue. So slowing the spread of the virus is not just about the virus; it is also about our economy. Second, we need to help employers to continue paying their employees through this crisis. Our objective should be to keep people at work and keep them connected to their employer as much as possible. That is where they get their healthcare. That is where they get their retirement, for the most part. That enables us to be able to ensure that as we ramp up our economy, it can ramp up more quickly because people will be there at work. There will not be the process of hiring and retraining. So one of our objectives in this legislation is not just to slow the spread of the virus but also keep people at work to the extent possible. And third, recognizing that not every employer is going to be able to keep employees. Even those who have some business going, don't have enough business. We want to be sure we are providing the resources to help those individuals. These are the people who are falling between the cracks. They can't stay at work because their work no longer has any revenue. We need to assist those people. Again, as we talked about, Ohio's unemployment claims have skyrocketed but so have unemployment office claims all around the country. The bottom line is that our country is not going to be able to come back until we slow the spread of this virus. I am pleased to say that the phase 3 package we have negotiated, by the way, accomplishes all three of those objectives--all three. We do it through four major policy areas. We do it now, right away, to bring relief to the people we are representing, which is why we have to pass this legislation and pass it now. First, in terms of helping people, this phase 3 package provides direct payments. These are direct payments--checks to individuals of $1,200 per person. If you are a couple, it is $2,400, and then it is $500 per child. That check getting out to people will give people some extra dollars to make the difference in being able to pay bills, paying the car payment, paying rent, and being able to put food on the table. It will give people some comfort to know that there is at least a little help coming directly and quickly. For those who are out of work, these checks also serve as a bridge to getting into the new unemployment insurance system I will talk about now. The checks are going to be necessary in that in most States it is going to take a couple of weeks--a few weeks--in some States several weeks to set up this new system. In Ohio, they say 2 weeks. This is the most significant expansion of our unemployment insurance system in history, by far. It is going to significantly expand the number of individuals who are eligible to receive benefits, particularly self-employed, so it broadens those who qualify for unemployment insurance. These folks, by the way, have never been covered by unemployment insurance before. What is more, it provides a flat increase of $600 per week per person in the unemployment insurance system. This means that for low- and low- medium-income folks, let's say 40- to 50,000 bucks a year, they will essentially have wage replacement now through unemployment insurance. This is a big difference. In Ohio, unemployment insurance is one-third of your wages for those same individuals. Now it will be topped up. So, to the point earlier that this is a highly partisan bill, I am sorry. This legislation reflects the priorities of Democrats and Republicans, and this is an example of that, and we have to acknowledge it. Is the bill perfect? No. No bill is perfect, certainly not when we are trying to respond to a crisis like this. We are pumping out more of our Federal tax dollars and borrowing Federal Treasury dollars than ever in the history of our country through this process when you add up this phase 1, phase 2, and phase 3. This is a bill that represents ideas from both sides of the aisle. Are there some things that might need to be adjusted by the Democrats in order to support it? I guess so because that is what we heard tonight from the Democratic leader, but we cannot start over, folks. This legislation does exactly what so many Democrats have called for and Republicans, to help people have the financial security and to pay their bills and to stay afloat. And, by the way, we also provide funding to the State employment offices so they can have Federal funding to deal with their administrative costs as they shift to this dramatically new system that is being provided through this legislation. So that is for people directly. Second, the stimulus package is going to provide relief for small businesses that are trying to stay afloat by ensuring they are going to have access to credit and liquidity needed to adapt and retool their businesses to weather this storm. We are going to accomplish this in a couple of ways. One is through a major expansion of what is called the Small Business Administration 7(a) loan program. This is going to go through businesses that are currently providing funding to small businesses. It is the community bank. It is the savings and loan. It is the credit union. It is the regional bank. Wherever people are banking, they will be able to get these loans directly. Specifically, we are providing hundreds of billions of dollars in loans to small- and medium-sized businesses that they can use for a variety of expenses, including payroll, including paying rent, paying mortgages. And, by the way, if they use it for that, the loan is forgiven. It really converts into a grant. If they use it for payroll-- again, let me repeat--to keep workers, because that is one of the objectives here, if they use it for rent, and if they use it for mortgage payments, the loan is written off entirely. It, essentially, is a grant to those small businesses. This is why the small business community is excited about this because they want to keep their employees, and they want to keep their doors open. They are waiting, and they are on the edge of their seats seeing what we do tonight and tomorrow. I have talked to many businesses back home who are saying: I can wait until Monday, but I can't wait any longer. I am bleeding cash. I have no revenue. I want to keep my people. I want to try to keep the doors open. You have got to give us some help. As I said before, the best way to protect workers and get our economy back up and running is to enable employers to keep paying their employees. This new program for small- and medium-sized businesses does just that. For businesses that might not be eligible for these SBA loans, the phase 3 stimulus helps provide immediate liquidity through a number of different ways. These are larger businesses--say, over 500 employees. One is through the Tax Code. Specifically, our bill includes provisions that allow businesses to put cash in the hands of companies so they can keep their workers employed and be ready to get back and running when the crisis is over. By the way, these tax incentives are things like not having to pay the employer side of the payroll taxes--the 6.2-percent FICA tax. That is incredibly important to these businesses. They told us that--give us a break on that for this year, 2020, and we can keep more people, and we can keep our doors open. That is probably the biggest single one here. But guess what. In 2021 and 2022, they have to pay that back. So the best part of these tax incentives is that the large majority of them are simply timing changes, meaning that while they are direct deductions in taxes now in 2020, when they need it, much of that deduction is going to be paid back in the coming years. Based on the rough estimates we have seen, these tax provisions could provide up to $500 billion in immediate cashflow increases, again, with more than half of that paid back to the Federal Government during the budget window. Third, the phase 3 package takes precise and targeted measures to relieve particularly distressed industries that are at risk of hemorrhaging jobs and closing down if we don't. I know the Democratic leader said he doesn't think help should go to businesses. I understand the Democrats actually want to give more help to some businesses. So I guess they will pick and choose the businesses. But in this case, these are the businesses we all know are, unfortunately, facing the possibility of shutting down unless we do something. Think of the airline industries. Think of the airlines that right now have seen their passengers be reduced by 80, some say 90, percent. Think of the airports that are closing. Think of the hotel businesses. Think of the other traveling tourism businesses and entertainment businesses. So these folks will be able to access what is called the Exchange Stabilization Fund to get a loan. And by the way, they will have to pay back that loan, but it is the Federal Government stepping in and providing a backup so they can get that loan and be able to stay in business. So those are the three aspects that help workers, that help small businesses, and that help with regard to all businesses. And then, finally, and I think most importantly, perhaps, in this legislation is funding and policy changes to slow the spread of the virus. Frankly, as I view this, this is to buy time. It is to buy time for us to increase the capacity of our healthcare system. This phase 3 package ensures that the men and women who are on the frontlines of this epidemic every day get more support. It increases funding, which we have already increased once, but an additional $4.5 billion for the Centers for Disease Control. Of that $4.5 billion, $1.5 billion of it has to go to the States. This is going to ensure we can continue to monitor and respond to this virus as this pandemic continues. I think this is incredibly important. It also sends more money out to ensure that we can get these antiviral therapies going. Think of Tamiflu for influenza, something that is key to dealing with this crisis as we begin to turn things around and is going to be having an ability to keep people healthier should they contract the virus. To me, maybe the most important parts of this legislation--because I believe in order to get our great country back on track and get people back to work, we need to have some sort of metrics in place. So maybe the most important part is to get better data on the true public health risk that is out there, and this legislation does that. It enables us to know, now that we have more and faster testing out there, finally-- and we needed more testing earlier--but now that we have that, how many new infections are there? That is probably the best measurement we have out there. How many new cases are there? This legislation provides the funding and provides the direction to support the public health officials at every level to get better and more acceptable results every day and report it to the CDC--from your local health authority and from your State Department of Health, those should be reported publicly every single day. Also, all that data needs to come to the National Centers for Disease Control every day so that we can know truly what is going on out there because we don't have that data now. And to have that data, it is going to give us a better understanding to measure both the crisis as it stands and the healthcare risk we all face but also to measure success as it starts to happen because we need to be able to measure that success to get people back to work, to get people back to their families, and to get people back on track in their lives. So this bill provides an increase in funding for healthcare--a major increase--in addition to what I just talked about. It provides about $100 billion for hospitals and all healthcare providers, with $75 billion being appropriated to HHS in order to support our healthcare systems in a more flexible manner and about $30 billion in Medicare payment increases for hospitals that are directly treating patients with coronavirus. This is what they are asking for. Finally, we have a couple of key proposals that we championed over the years to support people with disabilities, particularly in institutional settings that are at increased risk of contracting the virus. That is in this legislation. We have the Money Follows the Person Program, which supports transitioning Medicaid beneficiaries from dangerous settings--which some of them are in where there is a lot of activity--into home-based, long-term care. That is important too. As I said earlier, these are exceptional times. Not since the influenza epidemic of 1918, 102 years ago, has the United States of America been so swept up by a healthcare crisis like this. I am pleased with some of the steps we have taken so far at the Federal level to respond to this pandemic. We talked about them tonight. We have phase 1, $8.3 billion focused on healthcare; phase 2, beginning the process of helping workers and helping people get back to work and helping healthcare more; and now phase 3, which is an unprecedented amount of support from American taxpayers to ensure we can get people through this, help them weather the storm. And, again, these are Republican ideas and Democratic ideas through a process where we had four task forces that were bipartisan. We worked long hours. I was part of one of those task forces. Now we need to get this legislation passed. The American people deserve it. They deserve a Congress that does everything in its power to minimize the damage caused by the coronavirus. So let's put the partisanship aside. Let's get to a vote on this package as soon as possible, not 24 hours. Let's do it now. Let's do it now. We owe that to the people we represent. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I appreciate my colleague from South Dakota giving me a minute to respond to the comments of the Senator from Illinois about remote voting. I appreciate his joining me today on a bipartisan resolution to say that, during times of emergency and crisis, the U.S. Senate would be able to vote remotely in a secure manner. I think it is time for us to turn to this. I actually supported such legislation back in the House when I was there almost two decades ago. At the time, we didn't have, frankly, the electronic communications we have today to be able to safely vote remotely; now we do. We have the ability to do it in a secure way, in an encrypted way--a way that would protect the fundamental right to vote. I think it is important that we move forward with this. It is something that would be up to the majority leader and the minority leader to jointly agree upon. Once they agreed upon that, there would be 30 days. After 30 days, Congress would have the vote-- the Senate would have the vote to continue it. I think--not just because of COVID-19, where we have an obvious problem right now but the threat of terrorism, bioterrorism--these sorts of issues, unfortunately, are part of our 21st century life. We have to be aware of the fact that this is possible. It is important to me and I think all my colleagues that article I be heard; that the legislative branch be heard; that we have the ability to convene for the continuity of government and not allow what we would normally do, which is perhaps to shift over to article II--to the executive branch--or not to be addressed at all. I thank my colleague from South Dakota. I thank Senator Durbin from Illinois for working with me on this project. My hope is we can see a change in our Senate rules coming out of this process so that we can have the ability to do our constitutional duties regardless of what is happening with regard to the National Capital or the crisis we are currently facing with COVID-19. I yield back my time.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, today there is a discussion about transparency. I am going to talk about one that is maybe going to surprise some people, but it is about the lack of transparency and about $150 billion a year that is taxpayer money that is put into research and development. It is money that we, as taxpayers, pay to places like the National Institutes of Health. The National Institutes of Health does great research. So the Federal dollars go in there to try to develop cures--as an example, for diseases, but also for other healthcare research. There is the National Science Foundation, which does a lot of research on technology and research, and the Department of Energy, which does a lot of the basic research on science in our country. So I am going to focus on that funding today and a specific problem we have right now. It is about ensuring the government remains accountable to taxpayers. It is about ensuring that hard-working American taxpayers know where their money is going, and it is about a specific issue of that money going to research that is then taken by other countries, particularly by China, and the need for us to address that issue, in part, through transparency and, in part, through actually some new criminal statutes to be able to ensure that there is accountability. Last fall, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations did a study. It was about a yearlong study. We looked at this issue of China's talent recruitment programs and, more broadly, other countries, but, specifically, what China has been doing to find researchers over here in the United States whom they think are doing interesting work and recruiting those people to be able to provide that research and sometimes to have the person actually go to China to provide that research. The issue we focused on in our report was this theft of intellectual property at research institutions and at our colleges and universities. It was a shocking report. We issued it late last year. It showed, as you probably know now from some of the press accounts that have arisen since then, that, in fact, China was recruiting individuals who were giving up their research that was taxpayer funded. China has made no secret of its goal to surpass the United States to be the world leader in scientific research, but that doesn't mean they should use our research institutions here in America, paid for by us, to accomplish that goal. These talent recruitment programs--most notably, the Thousand Talents Program--recruits researchers at American universities and American research institutions to do the same research, usually at shadow labs in China, in order to just transfer taxpayer-funded research back to China. This is an issue that has been going on for two decades, we found out, and really kind of right under the nose of the FBI and others. The FBI testified at our hearing and said they readily acknowledge that they were asleep at the switch, essentially, that they had not been on top of it, and they have only recently begun to focus on it. We have seen the results of that, by the way. Little was done to stop it, but, recently, there has been a lot of publicity. You probably know about the recent arrest of Dr. Charles Lieber at Harvard University. Dr. Lieber actually lied to Federal investigators about his participation in the plan, and that is what they have charged him with. Most recently, today, we heard about another one, Dr. James Lewis at West Virginia University, who pleaded guilty to fraudulently requesting time off to raise a newborn, when he was actually in China conducting research as part of his agreement with this same group, the Thousand Talents Plan. Now, this is a definite conflict of interest. As an example, Professor Lieber is accused of accepting $50,000 a month from the Chinese talent recruitment program and, also, $150,000 in funding just for his expenses--now, remember, he is already being paid by Harvard--but also accepting $1.5 million to set up a shadow lab in China. He did not tell his employer, Harvard, about this. Again, he was not honest when talking to the Federal prosecutors, which is how he came to be charged. So the fraud that he was committing was not the charge because that is not a criminal offense. It needs to be one. With regard to the guy from West Virginia who just pleaded guilty yesterday, we don't know all the details yet there, but we know that this, again, is research that was being done, we assume partly funded by taxpayers, and this talent recruitment program was able to get that research. So this can lead, obviously, to a real problem because it is helping to fuel not just the Chinese economy but also the Chinese military. Some of Professor Lieber's research, apparently, was done for our military, and, therefore, they got military research and, we assume, military secrets as well. So they provide a reputational risk to the universities we are talking about, of course, and so many others around the country. But it is also just unfair to taxpayers, because this is government funded for the benefit of America, not to one of our stiffest global competitors. So we are working with the Trump administration to ensure that we know where that taxpayer money is going and making sure it is going to benefit the United States of America. Along with my counterpart on the subcommittee on the Democratic side of the aisle, Tom Carper from Delaware, we plan to introduce bipartisan legislation that uses the key findings in our subcommittee report to ensure that our research enterprise is protected here in this country and also to ensure that it continues to be open and transparent and accountable but also secure. Our legislation does this in a few ways, and a lot of it has to do with more transparency. First, it creates a new cross-government council at the Office of Management and Budget to coordinate and streamline the grant-making process between Federal agencies so we know where the money is going and how it is being used. Right now, these agencies don't talk to each other, and we don't know much about the grant-making process. We need to make that transparent. Sunshine, I think, will be a very effective disinfectant here. Second, the bill makes it illegal to not tell the truth on a grant application. Apparently, that happens all the time now. We requested some of these grant applications from the Thousand Talents Program. We weren't able to get all the information we wanted, but we got enough to know that most of these contracts, apparently, have the individuals saying: OK, I will accept this money from the Chinese Government through this program, but I will not tell my employer about it. On the grant application, they have to say that they will not reveal it. Obviously, that is defrauding the U.S. Government. The third part of our legislation closes the loopholes exploited by China and other countries and empowers the U.S. State Department to deny visas to foreign researchers who seek to exploit the openness of our U.S. research enterprise to steal intellectual property and research from our universities and research institutions. Now, this is something that the State Department has worked with us on and has asked for. They are looking for additional authority from us. When they know somebody is not here on a good-faith effort to do research but, rather, to take our research, they want to be able to act. Fourth, it requires research institutions and universities to have basic safeguards against unauthorized access to sensitive technology. You would think that is already in place, but, apparently, it is not. Also, it requires them to tell the State Department what technologies a foreign researcher will have access to on campus, so, again, we can start talking to each other, including folks at the State Department, law enforcement folks, and people in our research institutions. Fifth, it directs the U.S. Government to work with our critical research partners--think of Japan or Australia or the UK--to protect their research enterprises from Chinese theft as well. We are not interested in having U.S. taxpayer dollars go to do research here on which we then collaborate with a foreign government, an ally, and then that research is taken back to China or other countries. So we want more information about working with partners, as well, to protect that important research. And, finally, it requires colleges and universities to report any gifts of $50,000 or more and empowers the Department of Education to fine universities that repeatedly fail to disclose these gifts. Current law requires reporting at the level of $250,000. So if you get $250,000 from a foreign entity, you are supposed to report it. In our study we found, shockingly, that 70 percent of U.S. universities consistently failed to do that. So the universities don't want to report the fact that they are getting money from foreign governments, but we need to know that. The taxpayers need to know that. Lowering the threshold from $250,000 to $50,000 and increasing this transparency, including adding the penalty, ensures that those schools will report. In my view, that will lead to accountability and what we are looking for, which is more information. Beyond these provisions, we are all going to have to do more to protect the U.S. research enterprise. My bill makes it clear that research institutions receiving taxpayer dollars have to do a better job giving the government just basic information about foreign researchers they partner with. By the way, academics tend to agree. On Monday, the President of the American Council on Education in an op-ed agreed with our report's recommendation that research institutions should establish a ``know your collaborator'' culture--know whom you are collaborating with, know what their background is. Providing basic information about researchers and what they will have access to on campus allows the State Department to properly vet foreign researchers before issuing them a visa. Frankly, it is hard to believe that universities aren't already required to tell the U.S. State Department this information, but they aren't. A few universities and academic groups have raised concerns about the administrative burdens. We don't want to unnecessarily burden any research institution, university, or college, but we do want the transparency. It is my hope that our research institutions will step up and do their part as patriots to help us ensure that our taxpayer-funded research does not fall into the wrong hands. Research universities need to take a hard look at what is happening on their own campuses. This threat is very real. If universities expect to continue to receive billions in taxpayer research dollars, Congress has to ensure the academic community is taking basic, commonsense steps to secure the research. I believe our legislation is a balanced way to ensure that will happen. We talked earlier about the actions by college professors who have now been in the media. They have been charged by the FBI and others. One thing we do in this legislation, as well, is that we establish a new criminal law with regard to defrauding a university or defrauding the U.S. taxpayer. Again, the reason these charges that we talked about earlier were able to be brought is not because of the fraud that was committed but because, in one case, someone lied about the reason they were looking for leave, and, in the other case, someone lied to the FBI about whether they were involved in the program or not. So these were perjury issues, really, not in terms of the fraud. Our legislation also tightens that up. I think we all agree that the relationship we have with China is complicated. There is some good, and there is some bad. In my view, it is in both of our countries' interests to have a healthy relationship and have an exchange of new ideas and have the ability to collaborate where appropriate, but we cannot allow this continued theft of taxpayer-funded research. My hope is that this legislation will send a firm but fair signal to China to change their behavior, respect our laws when it comes to research, and see the wisdom of our research values here in the United States of openness, transparency, reciprocity, integrity, and, most importantly, merit-based competition. I encourage my colleagues to take a look at that legislation. We hope to introduce it the week after next, when we are back from recess. We believe that this legislation will be incredibly important to ensure that we can protect this research that taxpayer dollars are funding. With that, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am here to join my colleagues in speaking on the floor in advance of government Sunshine Week, but before I do that, let me commend my colleague from Oklahoma for his comments about the need for more transparency in government and particularly our grantmaking process. We have made some progress on that--most recently, the DATA Act. His predecessor in Congress, Tom Coburn, worked on this issue, and we came up with legislation when I was on the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue at the Office of Management and Budget to put all grants and contracts online, which was a start. But the DATA Act takes that to the next level to make sure there is uniformity in government. We still have difficulty with some agencies getting information out there, but he is absolutely right. It would make a difference because if people know how the money is being spent, it is much more likely to be spent wisely, all the way down to the ZIP Code in terms of where grants are going and what kind of Federal taxpayer dollars are being spent in our communities and whether it is being spent well. Government shutdowns, of course--I couldn't agree more with my colleague--have not worked to help make our government more efficient. In fact, we always spend more after the fact. Think about it. People were furloughed, and, then, when they went back to work, they got backpay. Well, it would have been much better had they been there to provide the services to the taxpayers. You also just have a lot of dislocation that is unfair and people who have to go to work who are essential employees. Think of our TSA employees--for those of you who travel in airports--not getting paid. A lot of them had car payments or house payments they couldn't make during the last government shutdown. It is just unfair. So we have to get at that. We have legislation that actually two-thirds of the Members of this side of the aisle have supported. Yet we have not been able to make that bipartisan. So I appreciate the fact that my colleague from Oklahoma has a bipartisan approach to that. We have tried for four or five Congresses now to pass legislation that simply says that at the end of the fiscal year, if you haven't completed all the bills, then the government continues to operate, but 1 percent of spending is cut every 120 days, and every 90 days thereafter to give the Appropriations Committees here the incentive to get to work and to get the budget bills done. That, I think, would work. It used to be a bipartisan approach. It is not now. So I am interested in looking at other options, including what the Senator from Oklahoma was talking about in terms of providing more pressure on us here to get our work done because these shutdowns clearly haven't worked to help make the government more efficient. They have just had the opposite impact.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, my colleague from Ohio just spoke about Nathaniel R. Jones, who was a circuit judge with the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati and had a distinguished career as a judge but a long, distinguished career as a true champion of civil rights going back to the 1960s and was also general counsel of the NAACP when landmark cases were decided. I also happened to have had the privilege of getting to know him over the years and considered him a dear friend. We have a resolution that passed the Senate last month with regard to Judge Jones, and I am pleased to join my colleague Sherrod Brown today in paying tribute again to Nathaniel R. Jones. That resolution is now in the Congressional Record and therefore the agent for all of us to be able to understand the importance of the work he did and for future generations to understand the importance of the march to freedom that he represented. Great American Outdoors Act Madam President, I am also here on the floor today to highlight the introduction of landmark new legislation called the Great American Outdoors Act. It is to ensure that some of our country's greatest resources and our greatest treasures, including our national parks, are taken care of for generations to come. I am proud to help lead the introduction of this bill along with my colleagues Senator Gardner, Senator Manchin, Senator Daines, Senator Warner, Senator Alexander, and Senator King. I also want to thank President Trump and his administration, first for President Trump's support of the Restore Our Parks Act, which is part of this legislation, over the past few years but also for their support of this broader legislation, the Great American Outdoors Act. In the spirit of President Teddy Roosevelt over 100 years ago, Federal land management agencies like the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and others have worked to designate and preserve some of the most beautiful and historic parks of our country. Those lands, of course, include those we all know of as our national parks--Yosemite, Yellowstone, some of the great ones, Glacier--but also more modest sites like the boyhood home of President Taft in my home State of Ohio. In all, the National Park Service and its system include more than 84 million acres of parks and historical sites that now attract 330 million visitors annually. Actually, that is a record. More people are going to the parks than ever. That is great. The concern is, when they get to the parks, sometimes the parks aren't working for them because of the huge infrastructure needs and the deferred maintenance problems. We have eight of these national parks in Ohio, including Cuyahoga Valley National Park, which is our largest single park and actually is the 13th most visited national park in the country. It is a great park. Whether it is for biking, hiking, fishing, or kayaking, I am one of those 2.7 million visitors to Cuyahoga Valley National Park and Ohio's national parks every year. I want to be sure these public lands are preserved so more Americans can visit these incredible sites into the future. Going back to my days as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the George W. Bush administration--going back about a dozen years--I have taken the lead on figuring out ways to help protect our national park sites throughout the country. At that time, we proposed-- in the Bush administration--a centennial bill. We were coming up on the 100th anniversary of our national parks, and the notion was to get more public-private partnerships involved in the parks. President Bush and his Secretary of the Interior at the time were very supportive of this effort, as was the Office of Management and Budget. After my time in the Bush administration, I was a member of the Centennial Commission on the National Parks, and here in the Senate, I am the author of what is called the National Park Service Centennial Act, which was signed into law in 2016, on the 100th anniversary, to establish the Centennial Challenge Fund for the national parks. By the way, that Centennial Challenge Fund has done pretty well--$113 million has been appropriated, but it has been leveraged by an additional $147 million from the private sector. So it has worked exactly as we intended it to--in fact, even better; it has been even more than a one-to-one match--the notion being, you put a challenge fund out there and say, if you care about the parks, the Federal taxpayer will put in some money, and you hope the private sector will also match it, and it has been more than matched. We also established the centennial endowment at what is called the National Parks Foundation. This endowment is intended to fund projects to address things like deferred maintenance at our parks. Separately, that centennial endowment has now $31.5 million in it. We know there is more work to do, though, to protect our national lands to ensure they are going to be there to enjoy for the future. The Great American Outdoors Act will help us in moving forward with this mission through two main initiatives. First, it will permanently fund what is known as the Land and Water Conservation Fund through a provision offered by Senators Gardner and Manchin--a $900 million initiative. The Land and Water Conservation Fund provides resources to State and local governments, as well as the Federal Government, to acquire land and water so that they can be protected. Often this is your city park back home, so sometimes it is neighborhood land. Sometimes it is land that connects to a national park or a national forest. Sometimes there is a checkerboard pattern of private ownership and public ownership, and it helps to connect those together to preserve some of our existing public lands. In any case, the Land and Water Conservation Fund has been successful over the years. Since its creation in 1965, over $330 million in LCF funding has gone to protecting land in Ohio, as an example, and ensuring recreational access to those lands. The second part of this legislation is that, along with the LWCF, the Great American Outdoors Act includes our bipartisan Parks Act. It is called the Restore Our Parks Act. I authored this along with Senator Warner, Senator King, and Senator Alexander. As I said, the parks and public lands are some of our greatest treasures in this country. The problem is that, over time, we have allowed this maintenance backlog to build up, meaning that a lot of the buildings and infrastructure, the roads, the bridges, and the water systems are deteriorating to the point that a lot of them are completely unusable. Again, it is great that a lot of folks are going to the parks now, but when they get there, sometimes the trail is closed, the bathroom is not working, and the visitor center has a leak in the roof and can't be used. So it is time for us to put some funding into these deferred maintenance expenses. Some would call them, perhaps, capital expenses. Why has this happened? Well, because although every year we appropriate funding for the parks, the funding is for the operations of the park--for the nature programs, for the rangers, for just the day- to-day activities--not for these infrastructure or capital expenses or what we call deferred maintenance. I have seen this firsthand in Ohio, where there is more than a $100 million backlog in long-delayed maintenance projects at our eight national park sites. Last fall I was at the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. I go there frequently. It is a great park, but it badly needs more than $15 million in repairs--renovations for shelters, for parking lots, for a bridge that is dangerous to cross, for railroad tracks. There is a scenic railroad that runs through the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, but the railroad track is in such bad repair that it is dangerous--or will be soon--to go on that scenic railway. Trails have been falling apart because of erosion, and they don't have enough money to do it. Let me give an example. The Cuyahoga Valley National Park has about an $11 million budget every year. So the taxpayers of America come to us here in Congress and say: Let's fund our parks. We fund the parks for daily operations, and $11 million goes to Cuyahoga Valley National Park--again, the 13th most visited national park. It is a great park. There are a lot of visitors. It is sort of a suburban and in some places almost an urban park as well as a rural park. It is exactly what we need more of. A lot of kids access it--a lot of schoolkids. Well, the deferred maintenance is over $50 million, so at $11 million a year, how do you pay for that deferred maintenance? That has been the challenge. Elsewhere in the State, I have toured Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial, which is on the shores of Lake Erie. This is at Put-in-Bay, so if you know Put-in-Bay--a famous spot for recreation, but the historic part of it is Perry's Victory Monument. It was established under those who fought in the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812, as well as to celebrate the long-lasting peace between Britain, 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 the site, which includes millions in needed repairs to fix a concrete seawall that is literally crumbling. The high-water level of Lake Erie has been part of the problem. Part of the problem is that it is just old, and it is crumbling. There are sinkholes around it. You are not allowed to go near the seawall or therefore near the lake. The visitor center needs significant updates and needs to be made ADA accessible. The Americans with Disabilities Act requires that they make it accessible, and they don't have the funds to do that. In that case, there is a $48 million price tag to do the maintenance repairs, and their annual budget is minuscule because it is a small park. It is a monument with a small visitor center. Yet they have this huge expense. I have also been to the Hopewell Culture National Historical Park in Chillicothe to see millennia-old burial mounds from the original Native Americans who were there and earthworks from the area's pre-Columbian inhabitants. Again, I also saw there about $3.5 million in unmet maintenance needs, including needed repairs to the exterior of the visitor center and its trail system. Parks have a lot of issues that over time have built up, and that is a huge problem for us. In a way, it is kind of like being a homeowner: If you allow the deferred maintenance to build up, if you don't take care of the roof, what happens? Your drywall gets wet, and you have mold in the drywall, and then the floor starts to buckle. But for being able to fix that roof, you have all kinds of other problems. That is what has been happening in our parks. The costs just keep mounting. The total backlog at the national parks is now believed to be over $12 billion. By the way, we require the parks to keep these lists: What are your most urgent needs, and what are the broad needs you have in terms of deferred maintenance? So we have good data on this one, and we know it is over $12 billion. It is a compounding problem. If you don't fix it, it gets worse and worse and worse, which only increases the cost to taxpayers. The longer we wait to address these maintenance needs--not fixing the hole in the roof creates a lot of other costs for taxpayers. I like this legislation because essentially it is saying: These are debts unpaid. This is work that should have been done previously. So let's find a funding source that is appropriate to that. I think the funding source we found is the right one, which is the on- and offshore oil and gas revenues. Instead of going into the U.S. Government, some of these are going to be diverted to our national parks to pay for expenses that have been there for years that we should have paid for earlier but just don't have the method and the ability to pay for those kinds of capital expenses or those kinds of deferred maintenance projects in the annual budget. So that is why we need to address this problem, and it is a problem that is growing. We don't want it to get worse. Again, it comes at a time when visitation is pretty good. From 2006 to 2017, annual visitation increased by more than 58 million people. Again, over 330 million people visited the parks last year. That has also put, I believe, more pressure on the parks and on this deferred maintenance we talked about. The challenges of keeping up with it have stretched our land management agencies thin--not just the parks but the Forest Service, our fish and wildlife refuges, our other Department of Interior land. We have more issues now because so many of these lands have been using bandaids to kind of get through it, and that doesn't deal with the underlying issues, so the costs are mounting. We initially introduced this commonsense solution to just deal with the parks, which, again, have reached over $12 billion. Since then, I am pleased to say we have worked with our colleagues on the other side of the Capitol, who included these other lands, and also with the administration to include funding for other land management agencies that also have deferred maintenance issues--again, the Forest Service, the BLM over at the Department of Interior, the fish and wildlife refuges, and some of the Bureau of Indian Affairs lands. To address this, the legislation before us creates what is called the Legacy Restoration Fund, which will provide $1.9 billion per year for 5 years--it is a 5-year program--from unobligated on- and offshore energy revenue. So these are royalties from that energy, which is actually increasing as we do more exploration. So it is a total over 5 years-- $1.9 billion a year--of $9.5 billion to be divided across the National Park Service, which gets the bulk of it, but also the Forest Service, wildlife refuge, Bureau of Land Management, and Bureau of Indian Affairs. It addresses only the priority needs because that is not enough to take care of all the needs. But the way the parks have analyzed this, they have priority needs of about $6.5 billion, as an example, out of the $12 billion, and all of those needs can be met with this funding. It is not all that is needed. We know we will have to go back at this again. But it is a very important bill--to do this for these 5 years to ensure that we can indeed have these treasures continue to be places where visitors can come from around the world, from around the country, from the Cleveland city schools right next to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, and enjoy the majesty of our public lands. I want to thank my colleagues again--Senators Gardner, Manchin, and Daines--for their support in helping to put this final package together. I want to thank our Restore Our Parks Act colleagues who have been at this a long time--4 or 5 years--Senator Warner, myself, and also Senator Alexander and Senator King. Finally, I would like to once again thank President Trump for his strong support of the Restore Our Parks Act over the past few years and now of this new product that has come together. He understands the need to protect the natural beauty of our public lands. I spoke to him about it today. To me, the Great American Outdoors Act is the next step in carrying out Teddy Roosevelt's legacy, Teddy Roosevelt's mission of protecting the environment for future generations. I look forward to the ability to debate this on the floor of the U.S. Senate week after next and to then pass it with a strong bipartisan vote and send it to the President for his signature to ensure that this landmark legislation, this historic legislation, can be enacted into law.

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

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, Senator Shaheen and I are here today to report this amendment. This is simply language that is being reinserted back into the Energy bill that was taken out. I will say that it is clarifying language. We made some slight changes to clarify that there are no mandates in this legislation, and it has to do with ensuring that we have encouragement of energy efficiency in the single largest use of energy in our country, which are our residential homes and commercial buildings. So I appreciate the fact that Senator Shaheen is here on the floor. I yield to the Senator.

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to call up amendment No. 1514 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. PORTMAN. I thank my colleague, and I yield back.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am here on the floor to talk about the legislation that is now before this body. We just passed the motion to proceed to the energy legislation, and we just heard about the legislation from my colleague from Alaska and the Presiding Officer's colleague from Alaska: Senator Murkowski, who chairs the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. The legislation is a good package. As she said very well, it both helps in terms of the economy and jobs and in terms of the environment. Who wouldn't be for that? It also has a whole series of proposals with which to do it. The ones I am going to talk about tonight are the energy efficiency proposals that she talked about. In particular, I am going to talk about a concern I have that the legislation that was offered tonight took out part of our energy- efficiency package, which we hope to add later by amendment, but I want to talk about why it is so important to add it back in. The legislation on energy efficiency is something I have introduced with Senator Shaheen, of the great State of New Hampshire, for 9 years now, going back to 2011. Some of it has gotten passed over time, but most of it has not, so we are, once again, bringing it up. The legislation is entitled the Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act, which is why we commonly call it Portman-Shaheen, because it is shorter. Our legislation has been voted on by this body before. Back in 2016, it passed the U.S. Senate. It has also passed out of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee five separate times with bipartisan votes. In 2016, the vote was 85 to 12. Again, it was part of a larger package at that time. There is a reason this legislation has received such broad, bipartisan support over the years. It lowers energy bills, which is a good thing. It reduces emissions, and it creates new jobs. It does it all without putting any new mandates on the private sector. It provides incentives but not mandates, and that is great news for the working families and businesses, large and small, that I represent. It accomplishes all this by improving energy efficiency in three key sectors. One is buildings, commercial buildings and residential buildings. The second is in the manufacturing sector, the industrial sector, of our economy. Then the third is with regard to our U.S. Government. Residential and commercial buildings, by the way, account for, roughly, 40 percent of the total U.S. energy consumption, which is why it is so important we have these sections with regard to buildings. With regard to our industry sector, manufacturers are excited about this legislation because it makes them not just more efficient in terms of energy, but it makes them more competitive globally. That is why the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers and other groups are strongly supportive of the legislation, as are well over 100 businesses. The Federal Government's part of this bill is also important. Guess what entity uses the most energy in this country--the Federal Government. It is the No. 1 consumer of energy in the United States. We think it is probably the No. 1 consumer in the world. This may not surprise you, but it is not terribly efficient. Our Federal Government sometimes preaches to the rest of us to be efficient, but our own Federal Government is lacking in that. So this legislation focuses on those three areas and makes a real difference. It moves the needle, as they say. It makes smart improvements to energy efficiency across these sectors. A recent analysis of Portman-Shaheen found that, over the lifetime of the legislation, the bill will save consumers $51 billion on their energy bills. It will result in an energy savings that is equivalent to the total energy use of all U.S. industry in 1 year, and it will reduce the carbon dioxide emissions--these are CO2 emissions--by the equivalent of taking nearly 4 million cars off the road every single year until 2050. As Senator Murkowski said very well earlier today, this is about reducing emissions. For those who are concerned about climate change and who want to reduce emissions, energy efficiency is a great way to do it--and, by the way, by creating jobs not eliminating jobs. Previous studies have shown that our legislation will also add more jobs to the economy. As I say, 100,000 jobs is our estimate. I must tell you that I am supportive of the package, and I am supportive of what Senator Murkowski said tonight. My disappointment is that the underlying legislation we are debating does not include two provisions in the Portman-Shaheen legislation. Those two provisions are two of the most important ones, for they result in the energy savings I talked about, in the additional jobs I talked about, and in the savings to the taxpayers I talked about. The first one is what is known as the SAVE Act. Now, the SAVE Act allows the energy savings of an energy-efficient home to be considered when determining the loan amount that a home buyer is qualified for when he goes to get a mortgage. In other words, it helps to immediately offset the cost of a more energy-efficient home by recognizing the reduced energy bill, which is often the second biggest expense a homeowner will incur after the mortgage payment. This bipartisan legislation was first authored by our friend and former colleague Johnny Isakson, along with Senator Michael Bennet, of Colorado. As a real estate person himself, Johnny championed this legislation over many years, and I thank him for his efforts. It is in our Portman-Shaheen bill. I was pleased to work with Senators Isakson and Bennet and include it in Portman-Shaheen. I am sorry it is not part of the energy bill tonight, but it is not the only important provision that has missed the boat on this package. Another important section of my energy-efficiency legislation that has been left out of the energy bill is known as the building codes section. This section focuses on providing best practices on how to make homes more energy efficient. We know that one of the most effective ways to ensure that a homeowner's energy bills are affordable is to build a home that is more energy efficient to begin with. It is important to note at the outset that the building codes we are talking about tonight are and will remain under this legislation as voluntary. You are going to hear that a lot tonight. There are no mandates in this legislation of any kind for new homes. It is up to States, local governments, and Tribes to adopt the building codes on their own that they deem fit for their communities. In fact, some States have building energy codes. Some States don't. Some States adopt part of what is called the model code, which we will talk about in a minute, and some States have no model code at all that they are going to adopt. In my home State of Ohio, for example, we have adopted parts of the 2009 model building energy code and parts of the 2012 model building energy code. So, instead of mandates or a heavy- handed government approach, this provision we are talking about is an incentive-based, opt-in program that is open, transparent, and cost- effective. It is not that the mandates haven't been tried before. Mandated building energy codes and mandated energy savings were included as part of the 2009 energy bill that passed out of the House of Representatives. There was even legislation introduced today over in the House that would impose mandates. Our legislation does not. It takes a much more commonsense approach, in my view, and leaves it up to the States to adopt which, if any, of the model building codes work best for them. Some of you might not know that these model building codes for commercial and residential buildings are developed and updated not through our government but through an independent organization outside of the Federal Government. For residential buildings codes, it is called the International Code Council, or the ICC. Every 3 years, this group, the ICC, conducts a process to update the residential model building energy code. Every 3 years, it does it. During that process, many stakeholders, including industry, builders, developers, State code officials, and the Department of Energy, can all weigh in with proposals or amendments. Then they vote to approve the inclusion of the proposals in the updated code. They all have a vote, including home builders. Today, the Department of Energy plays a role in the code development process just like other stakeholders. It has general authorities to offer and support proposals and to vote on the proposals. It has the authority to set targets to reach a certain percentage of energy savings during a code update. Since 1992, the DOE has had the authority to provide technical assistance and funding for States, local governments, and Tribes that want to update their building codes. So that is the current practice. It is not mandatory. The DOE can set targets and can provide technical assistance. However, there have been concerns from some stakeholders that the DOE has not been transparent enough or has not adequately considered the costs of proposals and targets. That is why, in this legislation, in addition to codifying much of what the DOE was already doing, our legislation establishes a rulemaking process that requires, for the first time, the DOE to work with States, Tribes, local governments, and other interested stakeholders to set these energy savings targets in advance of the model building code update. We require the DOE to do that. The purpose of the target is to set an energy savings percentage improvement from one model code to the next. It is intended to be a benchmark for stakeholders to consider when proposing, supporting, and voting on amendments, but it is not mandatory. In response to stakeholders' concerns that the target might not be cost effective--in other words, that DOE would establish a target that wasn't cost effective for homebuilders, as an example--or that it wasn't transparent and that what they were doing wasn't open, our bill also requires DOE to publish its methodology and provide a ``return on investment'' analysis, not previously required, and the estimated cost and savings as a result of the target. So we are forcing DOE to do much more than they do now--to be more transparent, to look at the cost benefit here, and to come up with a cost-effective analysis. Then, at the end of the day, the target itself is nonbinding on the model code process. DOE makes a determination on whether the target was met, and then this group, the ICC, sends their options, which they can choose to adopt in order to meet the target. They do not have to accept the changes, nor does this model code have to meet the target. So it is not mandatory even at that stage. They set a target, but it is not mandatory for the ICC to adopt it. It is also important to again note that the proposed model building code at the end that is ultimately published by the ICC is not an automatic mandate for new buildings. States are encouraged to take a look at the new proposed code and to let DOE know that they have considered the proposed code and determined whether to adopt it or not. Again, some States adopt it, and some States don't. So, as you can see, this whole process is one where the recommendation is made, but it is not mandated. Just as in the current law today, our bill authorizes DOE to provide funding and technical assistance to States to incentivize them to update their code. But, ultimately, the updated code and whether the States want to consider the updated model code or not is completely nonbinding and voluntary. I have heard concerns that our legislation will make new homes unaffordable. However, DOE's analysis found that, for example, if the 2015 code was fully adopted--so that was the 2015 code we talked about earlier that Ohio has partly adopted--it would result in a 33-percent reduction in energy use for that home and cost $2,787 per new home compared to the 2006 code. So, remember, this is a recent model code, 2015. They do it every 3 years. If it had been fully adopted, it would result in a 33-percent reduction in energy use for that family, and yet only an additional cost of $2,787, compared to the previous code. We also know that these upfront costs are typically financed entirely by these energy savings through the life of the mortgage, which is typically 30 years. So you know there is a little more upfront cost, but a 33-percent reduction in energy use would more than finance that over the time that the person owned the home. So, ultimately, our legislation is going to ensure that energy efficiency features of a home will continue to save homeowners money throughout the life of the building. This incentive-based approached to improving energy efficiency in new buildings has bipartisan support from a broad group of stakeholders. In particular, my colleagues on this side of the aisle support an incentive-based approach rather than a mandated approach. Our legislation has the support of the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Chemistry Council, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It has the support of commercial and real estate developers, like BOMA and the Real Estate Roundtable. It has the support from efficiency advocates and the environmental community, like the Alliance to Save Energy, the ACEEE, NRDC, and the BlueGreen Alliance. There is not a lot in Washington, DC, these days that has that broad group of stakeholders--strange bedfellows, you might say--but this bill does because what we do here makes sense. It doesn't take a heavy- handed government approach, but it takes an incentive-based approach, not mandated but providing the information so States, localities, and communities can make their own decision and can help to ensure that the best practices out there in energy efficiency are known, and where people want to use it, they can use it. If my colleagues are serious about both protecting the environment and growing the economy and increasing jobs, I believe this is the right legislation for them and that the voluntary business code language in the energy bill has to be included. So I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to help us with regard to an amendment we plan to offer later in this process to ensure that we do have the ability to both create jobs, improve the economy, and improve the environment. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I would like to start this morning by talking about a friend of ours who has chosen to move on and leave the Senate and spend more time with her wonderful family. I certainly understand that because the job she has, which is Secretary for the Majority, is more than a full-time job; it is living, breathing, sleeping this place, and she does a great job at it. Her name is Laura Dove. She has been doing this particular job for 7 years. Prior to that, she actually was here on three different occasions, as I understand it, working for the Senate. She grew up with it. Her dad was the Parliamentarian here for 36 years. Laura is a consummate professional. I work with her a lot on legislation. She helps me to get things through the process here, which is not always easy, but as significant, she works very closely with her counterpart on the Democratic side of the aisle and figures out how to get stuff done, how to keep this place operating so that the world's greatest deliberative body, as they call the U.S. Senate, can meet its great potential and expectation. So, to Laura Dove, we are going to miss you. As much as we understand why you need some time with your family right now and your great, great kids, we are going to miss you a lot.

Mr. PORTMAN

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

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am here on the Senate floor to talk, once again, about the addiction crisis in our country. Over the past 4 years, I am told I have given over 64 speeches on this topic, and that is because it is a crisis, and a national one, and we have done a lot here in this Senate and also in the House of Representatives to deal with the issue. We passed some important legislation. We are making some progress, but, gosh, prescription opioids, heroin, fentanyl, methamphetamine, and cocaine continue to harm so many people in our communities and so many of the families we represent. We put new policies in place to help deal with it--better prevention, better treatment, and better recovery efforts. Among other things, we passed legislation like the SUPPORT Act, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, the 21st Century Cures Act, and the STOP Act. Through these new laws, we have also provided over $4 billion in additional Federal resources just over the last 3 years to be able to combat this epidemic--particularly, the opioid epidemic. In Ohio alone, our State received nearly $140 million through the CARA and Cures legislation. It has gone toward innovative, evidence- based programs to try to figure out how we intervene at the appropriate time to keep people who are addicted from overdosing and, instead, to get them into treatment and into longer term recovery in a successful way. I have gone to visit many of these programs across our State, and I can tell you many of them are working, and they are working because local volunteers, local communities, and the State are also involved. So that is the positive thing. I was very pleased that the year-end spending bill passed with a record $658 million, as an example, in funding for these CARA grants that again go to these innovative ideas back home. Let me give you an example of one. In many of our communities now, we have the ability, after somebody has overdosed, not to simply have them go back home and go to the same neighborhood and get addicted, and continue to be addicted and overdose again and again and again, but, rather, to intervene and to go there with law enforcement, with treatment providers, with first responders, and get them into treatment. It is working. In a program I was recently at in Columbus, OH, the RREACT Team, 80 percent of the people whom they go to visit end up getting into treatment. And the evidence is, not only are they getting into treatment, but because there is the ability to monitor that, they are also going into longer term recovery programs. It is helping to save lives, but for the first responders, it is also a great relief because no one is more frustrated than they are. Think about it. You help somebody through an overdose by applying Narcan--that miracle drug that reverses the effects of the overdose--and the next day they are right back again. This is the right thing to do, and, again, we have made progress in that. The good news is, it looks like it is starting to pay off. After many, many years of increases in overdose deaths every single year, finally, we are making progress. In States like mine, overdose deaths had climbed to the No. 1 cause of death in our State; in other words, surpassing car accidents or anything else. There were more people dying of drug overdose deaths than anything else. Nationwide, we had some great success between 2017 and 2018. We now have those numbers in. In 2017, we had about 70,700 people who died of overdoses. In 2018, it went down to about 67,700. That is a decrease of 4 percent. Now, that is nothing to write home about, 4 percent. On the other hand, this is after three decades of increased overdose deaths every year and in some years substantial increases. So just to have that 4-percent decrease--and we are waiting for the 2019 figures to become available--was a big deal. In Ohio, we are one of the States that has been hardest hit. In 2018, our number was a 22.4-percent reduction. We were one of the States that led the country in this, and I am proud of that. That means a lot of lives saved. Still, though, the overdose rate is way too high--way too high. On the positive side, I think we are also seeing more accountability for the opioid crisis, in particular. As courts around the country hear cases of those affected by prescription opioids, like OxyContin, these drug companies are being held accountable by individual States, by some local governments, and by the Federal Government. Every day we learn more about what they did and how wrong it was. The sheer number of pain pills that drug companies pumped into the United States is astounding, with more than 100 billion pain pills between 2006 and 2014. So during that one period of time, 8 years, there were 100 billion pain pills. We have one county in Southern Ohio, Scioto County, where we had 48 million opioid pain pills distributed by manufacturers during those 8 years. By the way, that is 617 pills for every man, woman, and child in that one county in Southern Ohio. We were flooded with pain pills that were addictive, and we have to be sure that that kind of a crisis doesn't start again. As I travel around the State of Ohio, I hear stories all the time of people who had an accident or had an injury, and they took pain medication prescribed by a doctor. That led to physical addiction. Something in their brain changed. They became addicted. They couldn't get the prescription drugs because they are too expensive or not accessible enough, so they turned to heroin. In many cases, the tragedy that occurred was not just an overdose but sometimes an overdose and a life lost. I hear this all the time. Just this morning at my weekly Buckeye Coffee, where we have constituents come in once a week and meet with Ohioans, I met an impressive young man from northeast Ohio. He told me about his brother, Dylan. He reminded me that I had met his mom. I already knew about Dylan because his mom had told me, but Dylan struggled with pain pill addiction before tragically dying of an opioid overdose. It is a pattern that we have seen too often in our communities, and it needs to stop. We are making some progress there, I think partly because of the lawsuits, partly because we increased awareness, partly because of the Federal legislation we discussed that has helped on this, and partly because doctors and others are beginning to get the message. We have cracked down on pill mills as well. I mentioned Portsmouth, OH, and Scioto County, OH, where there were hundreds of pain pills per person. They had pill mills. Because of all of that, the number of prescription pain pills prescribed between 2013 and 2018 fell by more than 80 million--about a 33-percent decrease nationwide. So pushing back against this opioid flow that flourished for way too long here in the United States is helping, and that is a positive sign as well. Again, while the CDC--Centers for Disease Control--has shown an overall decrease in drug overdose deaths for the past 18 months or so, I want to talk tonight about some new troubling trends and the need for us in Congress not to take our eye off the ball because sometimes around here, you get a little progress, and you think: OK. Let's go on to the next thing. Unfortunately, that is not the way addiction works, and we have seen this over time. Back in the 1990s, we thought we had solved the cocaine crisis; we didn't. Now some think we have solved the opioid crisis; we haven't. In addition, there are new troubling trends I want to talk about tonight. The most worrying is, while the overall number of opioid deaths has fallen, the number of overdose deaths related to the very deadliest of opioids--synthetic opioids like fentanyl or carfentanil--has actually increased. In fact, in 2018, more deaths were attributed to fentanyl than to heroin and prescription drugs combined. So it has shifted. Think about this. From the prescription drugs to the heroin, now to fentanyl. Fentanyl is 50 times more powerful than heroin. A few flakes of this stuff can kill you. Unfortunately, it is being mixed into other drugs, partly because it is so powerful and a few flakes can kill you. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 40 percent of drug overdoses in 2017 were at least partly because of fentanyl use--40 percent. It is by far the largest problem. That data also showed that overdose deaths due to fentanyl had increased by 88 percent per year since 2013. So it has been going up really since the 2013, 2014 time period. We are seeing this mixing occur in a lot of overdose reports from Ohio communities, where declining prescription opioid and heroin use has opened the door now for this other form of addiction. In particular, psychostimulants, as they are called, like crystal meth and cocaine, are being laced with fentanyl. This is a deadly combination. According to our State's deputy attorney general for law enforcement, Carol O'Brien, Ohio law enforcement officials in 2018 tested double the amount of methamphetamine samples as they had in 2017 and triple the amount from 2016. So crystal meth is, unfortunately, making a resurgence in our communities. By the way, you may remember in the past couple of decades in your community you heard about these meth houses, where people would be cooking meth, literally, in a home or in a trailer or in the basement and causing environmental concerns and so on. You don't hear about that anymore. Do you know why? It is because crystal meth coming straight from Mexico is so powerful and so cheap that people don't have to make it at home anymore. That is a bad thing because this has expanded to the people who have become addicted to methamphetamine because of this powerful crystal meth. Today I met with law enforcement officers from around the State of Ohio. The FOP was in town, the Fraternal Order of Police. Many of my colleagues met with them. They confirmed this troubling trend. They told me that the crystal meth and the cocaine, because they are psychostimulants, are much more difficult for them to deal with and puts their lives and their safety more at risk, as well as the citizens whom they are there to protect. Why? Because it causes a more violent reaction. Think about it. With heroin, with other opioids, prescription drugs, fentanyl, people talk about the nodding effect. It calms people more. Whereas, with heroin, with cocaine, and with the other psychostimulants, like crystal meth, it makes people more agitated and more violent. We have seen not just more assaults on individuals but more violent crime overall coming out of this. So it is a shift that is impacting our police officers and our citizens, as well, in terms of increased violent crime. I am really pleased to say that the legislation we passed in December--just about a month and a half ago--responded to this issue of the increase in meth and cocaine. It is because it included our legislation called the Combating Meth and Cocaine Act. It is a really important bill. Basically, what it says is, let's give local communities the flexibility to use the opioid grant money that I talked about earlier, that has increased over the last 3 or 4 years, also to be used for psychostimulants. I felt very strongly about this because I was hearing it back home: Thank you very much for your help on the opioid crisis. By the way, we have shifted now in our community. Opioids are not as big a deal, but we need the funding to also help us deal with the consequences of crystal meth or cocaine. I thank my colleagues for passing that legislation. It is going to make a big difference, and I think we will now begin to see the ability to address this new threat. The U.S. attorneys for the Northern and Southern Districts of Ohio have recently weighed in and told me what is going on in terms of this mixing of cocaine and crystal meth with fentanyl. They say it is a crisis. Preliminary data from Cuyahoga County, which is in Cleveland, OH, suggested about 45 percent of the fatal overdoses in the county last year were associated with cocaine, much of that mixed with fentanyl. By the way, that is twice the amount of heroin overdoses over that same time period from the previous year, which shows how, again, the frontlines of addiction have shifted, partly in response to our successes on the opioid front. We are hearing similar things in the Southern District of Ohio, where more than a third of overdose deaths are from cocaine and fentanyl, where they just had 10 overdose deaths from the combination of fentanyl and cocaine in the last several days. I met with the Columbus, OH, police chief, Tom Quinlan, on Friday, in the middle of a spike there, a spike in overdose deaths that they have seen from this mixture. In the first 10 days of February, this month, Columbus, OH, Franklin County, had 28 overdose deaths involving some combination of fentanyl and cocaine--28 in 10 days. I was actually in Columbus on Saturday, a day in which five people died from overdoses of a mixture of fentanyl and cocaine. Just yesterday, the Columbus police informed me that in one drug bust, they seized over 200 grams of cocaine and nearly 2 kilograms of fentanyl. That is enough to kill about 1 million people. Again, we have made some progress on the opioid front, no question about it. We have made progress in terms of the overprescribing of prescription drugs, but, unfortunately, my colleagues, this issue is not going away. The more flexible funding we got in at the end of the year is important, and we will begin to see that take effect here over the next several months--it is just being implemented now--but we have to deal with it. The other thing we have to deal with in terms of fentanyl is being sure that some evil scientist doesn't slightly change the molecular compound of fentanyl, making it an analog of fentanyl that is not illegal. You have to schedule a drug to make it illegal. As we have seen an uptick in these fentanyl copycats, we have seen the reality that it is not just about fentanyl. It is also about carfentanil, and it is also about other analogs. As an example, we had an 819-percent increase from just a year ago in Cleveland with carfentanil deaths in 2019. So from 2018 to 2019, there was an 819-percent increase. That is why the DEA--the Drug Enforcement Administration--has made the right call in 2018 in temporarily making these fentanyl-related substances, like carfentanil, illegal to possess, transport, or manufacture. Thanks to that designation, our law enforcement officials have been better able to protect our communities by seizing and destroying this fentanyl-related substance because it is illegal. We had a real problem in the last couple of months here in Congress because, as of early this month--just last week--that scheduling of those analogs expired, and we almost had a situation where these drugs were going to become illegal. Thank goodness, at the last minute, we stepped in, and we provided a temporary extension; otherwise, again, last week, we would have had a real crisis. Unfortunately, the temporary extension, like so much stuff around here, was kind of kicking the can down the road. So in May of next year--just a year and a few months from now--again, it is going to expire. I strongly urge my colleagues to join me, Senator Manchin, and others on both sides of the aisle in passing legislation that puts these analogs on the schedule, making them illegal permanently. It should be permanent. The legislation is called the FIGHT Fentanyl Act. Again, it just codifies what the DEA has done but also gives them the flexibility to be able to schedule new things, as, again, these scientists come up with ways to slightly alter the molecular compounds for these incredibly dangerous and deadly drugs. By the way, our legislation has strong bipartisan support but also has the support of every single attorney general in every State in America and six territories. Fifty-six of our attorneys general have come forward and endorsed our bill, and I thank them for that. Let's do that. Let's push back against these deadly copycats of fentanyl and be sure that our communities are just a little bit safer. Again, we have made a lot of progress in the fight, but as we have seen, addiction--not a particular drug but addiction--is really the crisis we face. As we have made progress against opioids, including an unprecedented Federal response here--and I appreciate that very much-- we now see the playing field changing. We see these psychostimulants like cocaine and crystal meth making a comeback. We see this mixing with fentanyl. Again, the funding bill passed last year will help as it begins to implement these changes. We need to be sure that the FIGHT Fentanyl legislation is passed, and we need to be sure that we continue the funding. It is easy to say: Well, this crisis is better; let's move on. We have to keep our eye on the ball. So I thank my colleagues as we go through the funding process again, but we have to keep the funding for the CARA legislation and others. We also have a new bill called CARA 2.0, so Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act 2.0, and it expands the reach of these evidence-based programs we are talking about, particularly longer term recovery programs, because we have learned that it is so critical to actually get somebody into recovery and keep them in recovery for a long enough time so they don't relapse. In that legislation, we also have important legislation with regard to opioid prescriptions because that is still a problem. We say that there should be a limit of 3 days for acute pain--not for chronic pain but for acute pain, limit it to 3 days. That comes from a recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but also from the FDA. I have heard from too many families--like the young man I heard from this morning--about someone whose child has become addicted because the doctor gave them too many opioids. By the way, I now know several families whose son or daughter was given opioids when he or she had a wisdom tooth removed, which apparently is one of the top two or three most common procedures in America. Doctors and dentists are still giving these kids opioids. I think that is wrong, and I think that should be stopped altogether. In the meantime, 3 days is a sensible limit. A doctor can always prescribe more if you have an issue. And I think there are proper exceptions for chronic pain. I think our legislation would make a big difference. It also has a prescription drug monitoring program, which would require States to make their monitoring programs and their data available in other States because people go from State to State to get these prescription pain pills. This would help against overprescribing, making sure people are treated as soon as possible and identified. I urge my colleagues who are not yet cosponsors of any of these bills--the FIGHT Fentanyl bill and the CARA 2.0 bill--to help us and to join us in responding to this ever-evolving challenge we have, which is not just an opioid problem; it is an addiction problem. Every State represented in this Chamber is affected by this epidemic, and these two bills at least provide us an opportunity to continue to give law enforcement the tools they need to give our communities the help they need to be able to overcome this crisis. I yield the floor.