Rob Portman

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I thank my friend and colleague from Virginia for those comments. Our provisions are designed to bring more clarity and legitimacy to the cryptocurrency industry by more closely aligning the reporting requirements with those of more traditional financial services, and we believe it does just that, and in doing so, will help provide more certainty for people looking to invest in digital assets. I thank my colleague Senator Warner for coming to the floor to discuss this important provision. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I appreciate my colleague from Delaware. He is the chair of the committee that produced a lot of the work that went into this package. Roads, bridges, the highway bill, and the surface transportation bill comes through his committee. He and Senator Capito from West Virginia worked together, on a bipartisan basis. And my recollection is the underlying bill that we pick up in this broader bill that has to do with roads and bridges and so on passed with a vote of 22 to nothing out of this committee, and that is because they did good work in finding out where there was common ground. And, frankly, you know, the American people deserve to have good roads and bridges and infrastructure to drive on and travel on. So it is a big part of this bill, and I thank him for his work on that. We have now voted twice to proceed to this very important legislation, to finally, after a lot of years of talking about it, making major improvements to our Nation's roads and bridges and railroads and ports and waterways and water infrastructure, electrical grids, our broadband networks, and more. It is overdue. And I am delighted to say that twice now we have voted to proceed to final passage. One was a vote of 66 to 28, and the other was a vote of 67 to 27. And, frankly, there were a couple of people on our side of the aisle who were not able to come vote, one of whom has COVID and the other, in both cases, somebody had travel difficulties. So we would have had two more votes on our side that were positive votes as well. So this is a supermajority, and it is because the legislation makes sense for the States represented here in this Chamber and for the American people. It will improve the lives of all Americans. It will make life better. So the mom who is stuck commuting, who would rather be spending time with her family every day, you know, is going to have the ability, through better transportation infrastructure, to have fewer minutes and hours every day in gridlock. The truck driver who leaves the home, you know, and says goodbye to his family and goes on a long haul and thinks, ``You know, am I going to be safe?'' it will be safer, thanks to this legislation. We had two trucks collide on a bridge in Ohio recently. It is not safe. There is no shoulder on the bridge anymore because the traffic is bearing twice the number of vehicles that it was designed for. The mom who has been taking her daughter to the public library parking lot 30, 40 miles from their home to get internet access in order for her daughter to do her homework will now be able to have internet and be able to have broadband in her community right up to her home because of this historic investment in ensuring that the digital infrastructure is put in place. So you don't have this divide. We have got counties in Ohio that just don't have internet, period, and others have very slow internet. We have got about 30 counties that are a part of Appalachia. We have got about 18 of those counties that are unserved and another large group that are underserved. And that digital divide makes a huge difference because, again, those kids are going to fall behind, certainly during the pandemic, when they had to be accessing the internet to just stay up with school. But even postpandemic, you know, we want to be sure that that learning opportunity is there. And then in terms of telehealth, you know, there are veterans in southeast Ohio who aren't able to make the drive to the VA clinic in Columbus or elsewhere, but they can take advantage of telehealth; and they have, to the extent they have access to it during the pandemic, and it has been actually quite helpful. But if they don't have access to the internet and high enough speed internet, they can't get the healthcare at home that they need for appointments. It is also important for business. If you are a small business owner in these parts of the country that don't have internet access, it is really tough to get off the ground. And these are the very areas of the country where we want to have more economic development, so that is in this legislation as well. And in terms of water infrastructure, Ohio has got a lot of aging water infrastructure. I saw someone wrote a story recently, saying that only about a quarter of this bill goes into hard assets. That is just not accurate. In fact, a quarter of it goes to roads and bridges and even more, I guess. But water infrastructure is a hard asset. Ask the communities in Ohio that have been told by the EPA, in Republican and Democrat administrations: You got to fix your sewer system; you got to fix your drinking water system; you can't have combined sewer overflow. And they just can't afford it, particularly in these mid-size cities. They are really excited about water infrastructure Our ports, that is hard infrastructure too. So ships are lined up at some ports right now, including out West. And so if you are a consumer, you are trying to buy something and you are wondering why you can't get it, including, you know, maybe an electronic device you want, or maybe it is a part to an automobile that you want, a lot of it is it is stuck. Stuff is stuck right now because our ports are not efficient enough and capable enough to handle what they should be able to do. Our land ports, if you are concerned about the southern border and the ability to screen trucks and cars coming in to try to keep some of this deadly fentanyl and other drugs from coming over our southern border, you should want this legislation because it is going to provide more infrastructure for our ports. So there is a lot in here that will make people's lives better, and that is obviously one reason that this is so popular, because people do expect it here in America. This great economy we have, we should be able to also lead the road in infrastructure, and we don't. There is a study out saying, in fact, we are not even in the top 10 in terms of infrastructure around the world. It also will make our infrastructure more resilient to natural disasters and other crises. It will make our Nation safer and more secure. It will grow our economy in a million small but meaningful ways. What the economists say when they look at this legislation--and by the way, again, every President in modern times has proposed this big infrastructure package for this reason. They say it will make your economy more efficient. So we have fallen behind on infrastructure, and if we can catch up, the economy is more efficient; therefore, we are more productive; therefore, the economy grows; therefore, more tax revenue comes in from infrastructure. So it is a good long-term investment. It is not money that is going to be spent next year. Think of the projects in your community that might be helped. That project may last for 10, 15 years, even before it is finally completed. So this money goes out over time for hard infrastructure. That is one reason it doesn't affect inflation in a negative way. In fact, it is counterinflationary because it invests in hard assets and in jobs over time. If you are in business, think about your capital expenditures. Your capex budget is going to be different than your day-to-day spending than you probably thought of from your capex. It is going to also take some important steps to repair, replace, and build assets that will last for decades. Again, that makes life better for people. It makes the economy more efficient. It also is something that, as economists look at it, they believe will be counterinflationary. It has been made clear in poll after poll this is something that brings this country together. So, unbelievably, there is a poll by CNBC showing 87 percent of the American people think it is important that we, here in Congress, invest in improving our roads and our bridges. Within a couple of months, another poll by CBS found exactly the same number, that 87 percent of the American people support more Federal spending on repairing roads and bridges. An Associated Press poll found that 8 in 10 Americans favor plans to increase funding for roads, bridges, and ports, and for pipes that supply drinking water. That is what the bill does. And we need the investment. Let's be honest. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives our infrastructure in America a grade of C-minus. That is not very high. And they project our economy stands to lose more than $10 trillion in GDP--$10 trillion in our economy--by 2039, if we fail to invest in these repairs. We have fallen to 13th in the world in infrastructure while key foreign competitors, like China, spend now four times more on infrastructure than we do. China is spending four times more as a percent of their economy on infrastructure than we do. Why? Because they want their economy to be more efficient. They want to compete with us and win. We want to compete with them and have American workers win. Thirteenth in the world is based on a study that is done periodically. To ensure that we are comparing apples to apples, they look at all kinds of things. America has a very strong, competitive economy, generally, but infrastructure is a weakness for us. So this is the World Economic Forum. They put this study out periodically. I follow it. I look at it because it has a lot of different things in it--not just infrastructure--as to how our economy is working. How are we doing on permitting? Not so good. Guess what. We have permitting reform in this package, and the permitting reform will allow the Federal dollar to go further. So think about it: If it takes 6, 8, 10 years to permit a project, the enormous cost involved in that. But if you can do it in 2 years, which is the goal of our permitting reform, that makes a huge difference. And a lot of it is because you have a lot of different Federal Agencies that are requiring permits. If you have an energy project, whether it is a fossil fuel project or whether it is a renewable energy project, you can have as many as 30--I am told, in 1 case, 35 different permits. By the time you finish the first 30, you have to go back to the first one again to get fit in. It is crazy. We had a project in Ohio actually shut down because they just couldn't handle the permitting. It was actually a hydropower along the Ohio River. So that is in this legislation, too--historic permitting reform--and that should make sense to every taxpayer. Yet we want to go through the environmental studies. That is fine, but let's do it quickly and efficiently and require one Agency to be in charge and accountable. That is what this does. It requires that there be a dashboard that anybody can look up and find out where that project is. That keeps it moving, very transparent. That is in this proposal. So there are some good things in here that ensure that the money that is spent is spent more wisely than it has been in the past. Let's be sure people can't come back and sue after the fact. We take the amount of time that someone can come back after the fact and sue on a project from 6 years to 2 years. That is very important to developers. That is very important to our workforce. That is very important to the building trades in this country. You look at the list of supporters of this project, and, I mean, it is unbelievable. The American Farm Bureau and over 30 farm groups have now come out for this proposal. So for those in Big Ag States, I would say, listen to your Farm Bureau--you usually do--and they will tell you this is very good for the farmer who wants to get his crops to the market. In Ohio, we have a lot of soybeans. We want to get them to the elevator in order to be efficient, but we also send them all over the world. So we want our ports to be efficient. But it is not just the Farm Bureau. You have the National Association of Manufacturers supporting this, the American Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and the AFL-CIO Building Trades Council. The men and women who do the work strongly support this legislation. So it is going to help in terms of jobs, competitiveness. And, again, it is no wonder that so many people over the years have said: We need to fix our infrastructure. Every President in modern times, by the way, has had a proposal to do so. The joke here in Washington is, ``Oh, it is infrastructure week again'' because, frankly, administrations over time have had infrastructure week--``We are going to get infrastructure done this week''--and nothing has happened. Congress has been stuck. We have been in gridlock on this, kind of like the gridlock during rush hour in so many of our cities today that we want to fix with this bill. Well, that gridlock here has kept us from doing what we are trying to do in this legislation. Five hundred and fifty billion dollars in additional funding over the next 5 years is what this is. Others have said it is a trillion. I don't--it is $550 billion. It is actually a little less: $548 billion is what the final number was over 5 years, as a shot in the arm to help get these projects going, not just in the next year or 5 years but over the next 20 or 30 years. This money will be spread out over time. But this is part of how we get America on a track where we have good- paying jobs and more efficiency in our economy long term. Every President, as I said, has tried to get the infrastructure bill done. One of those Presidents is our most recent President, President Donald Trump, who pushed to pass a $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill during his time in office in his budget. As a developer, he gets it. He understands the importance of infrastructure, and I applaud him for that. And, honestly, I think he changed the discussion a little bit on my side of the aisle. I think he got more Republicans thinking. One of my colleagues told me recently the two things government ought to do and do well is national defense and infrastructure. I think there are other things that government does as well, but that is not a bad list for what the priorities ought to be for the Federal Government. Look at the Interstate Highway System as an example of what needs help now. So I appreciate the fact that President Trump got the discussion going among Republicans who might not previously have focused on that. Here are just a few highlights of what we secured in this legislation. We are going to provide billions in funding for some of our most pressing hard infrastructure needs: $110 billion in new spending over the next 5 years to construct, rebuild, and maintain our Interstate Highway System, our roads, and our bridges. That is going to make a big difference for us in Ohio. We have 123,000 miles of roads. And where traffic congestion occurs in Ohio, we have an estimated $4.7 billion lost each year--lost time, wasted fuel, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers--$4.7 billion because of traffic congestion in Ohio alone. They also say there are currently more than 46,000 bridges in our country that are considered structurally deficient and in poor condition. Think about that: 46,000 bridges considered structurally deficient and in poor condition--46,000. And yet, 178 million trips are taken across these deficient bridges every single day. One hundred and seventy-eight million cars or trucks go over these same structurally deficient bridges. Ohio, by the way, is No. 2 in the Nation for bridges. We like bridges in Ohio. We have lots of creeks and rivers and railroad tracks to go over. We have over 40,000 bridges, but nearly half of those are not in good condition. That is the reason I am pleased this bill provides $12.5 billion to fund the bipartisan Bridge Investment Act that will award competitive grants to improve our Nation's bridges based on whether they are major bridges of commercial activity, based on their condition, based on their safety. We have $60 billion total to help State and local government fund major construction projects, like the long-awaited Brent Spence Bridge Corridor in my hometown of Cincinnati, OH. We have been talking about replacing the Brent Spence Bridge as long as I have been in elected office, and that has been a while. It has been probably 25 years of talking about this. Let's get it done. We are going to make immediate reforms to the permitting process, as I said, because that will help with regard to that bridge and others to do it more quickly, more efficiently, with less cost to the taxpayer dollars Again, I want to commend the Trump administration because they prioritized that issue. But the legislation that we had passed here to help with speeding up permitting sunsets. So this legislation that we are voting on here actually ends that sunset and, therefore, ensures we can continue that permitting going forward. If we don't do it in this bill and don't do it soon, we are not going to have projects signing up for this interagency council on permitting because they will have the sunset. They know that they are not going to be able to take advantage of it. So that is really important. We also strengthen the provision, make it cover more projects, and ensure that, again, we are going to get these permitting reforms to make this dollar--this Federal dollar--go further. And we are going to make a necessary investment in the future of our economy by providing $65 billion to increase access to broadband services to connect more Americans to the internet. In Ohio, it is estimated that about 300,000 households lack access to the high-speed broadband that many of us just take for granted. We assume everybody has it. People don't. It is holding folks back from being able to get the schooling they need, the healthcare they need, or to have the economic opportunities that come with being connected to the internet. These are just a few highlights, and I can go on. But the bottom line is that we are dedicating almost $550 billion to new infrastructure spending over the next 5 years to go toward a wide range of priorities that will collectively have a positive impact on the people I represent and all Americans. Importantly, we have funded our bill through a number of responsible pay-fors without any new taxes on working families, on small businesses, on large businesses, on anybody. This is being done without tax hikes. That is significant because, remember, when we first started talking about infrastructure, it was in the context of a proposal from the Biden administration for a huge increase in taxes. It was a $2.65 trillion package and included incredibly steep tax increases. In fact, taxes increased to much more than taxes were cut back in 2017 in that proposal, about four times more. Some say five times more. But we decided: No, let's not do that. Let's pull infrastructure from this package--really core infrastructure, because infrastructure is being defined in ways that it had never been defined before, including so-called soft infrastructure: social spending for nursing homes or for healthcare or for electric car companies outside of infrastructure. We said: No, let's just pull the core infrastructure out of it, and let's take the taxes off. And that is how we got down to, again, $548 billion and without taxes. So from the start, we have said some of our pay-fors will not be fully reflected in the formal CBO score that came out on Thursday. But, instead, it will be reflected in CBO estimates. What is CBO? CBO is the Congressional Budget Office. It is the group up here that we have to rely on in terms of our legislation to say how much something costs. Republicans and Democrats alike love to complain about CBO. In fact, often, it is my Republicans complaining about them on my side of the aisle because they don't give enough credit to the feedback effect from tax cuts. Democrats are kind of just the opposite. They think there should be more feedback effect--in other words, a dynamic score as relates to spending. And we disagree on their calculation of scoring. But that is who we have to rely on. So the CBO estimate that just came out, including what they said about their official score, was disappointing to me because they didn't follow what we wrote in the law. We have had this discussion, and, you know, they are the arbiter. So my same Republican colleagues who have complained about CBO over the years in other contexts are now saying: Well, look, the CBO score isn't high enough. You know, you said about half of it would be paid for by official CBO scores. Well, it is, but they didn't give us credit for it. One example is CBO's limitation that they can't account for States returning to the Federal Treasury the money that we dictated they had to return in our bill. They just won't do it. Fifty-three billion dollars was in our legislation for unused funds from the enhanced COVID UI supplemental put in place during COVID-19. Recouping this outdated supplement is a win for the American taxpayers, and everyone should support sending it back toward projects like infrastructure that help move our economy forward rather than for other purposes. And yet CBO gives us no credit for that. CBO is not fully able to reflect the funding streams that will help pay for our legislation in other ways as well. I will give you, perhaps, the two most striking examples of this. One is that working with the White House, working with the Office of Management and Budget, working with the individual Agencies, we were able to determine that some of the COVID-19 funds that this Congress had sent back to the States through Agencies was not being spent, and so we wanted to repurpose that money through this purpose. Remember, we spent a lot of money, including $1.9 trillion recently. But even before that, four different pieces of legislation were sending money out to the States for COVID-19 purposes. And so we said: Well, if it is unused COVID funds, let's return it to the Treasury and apply it to this. And it makes sense. Infrastructure is something States and localities are eager to have--better infrastructure--and it is appropriate to use some of that funding. So we said in our proposal that $41.8 billion would be rescinded based on what we got from OMB, from the individual Agencies on their unobligated funds. The White House signed off on it. We all signed off on it, Republican and Democrat. Unfortunately, CBO chose to give us credit for just $13.4 billion rather than $41.8 billion. It is frustrating. It is a difference of $28.4 billion in savings. Now, what they say is that we are not convinced that even though these are unobligated balances--which we have been able to prove, by the way, and we have documents from the White House, now, after the fact, showing this again. But they have said: Well, we don't believe that these Agencies that have extra money are going to spend the money. That is one of the reasons they gave. We think they will just keep the money. When has an Agency not spent the money that Congress provides them, I would ask my colleagues? I will give you a real-world example of this. As we started to look for these unused COVID funds, it turns out that the U.S. Department of Agriculture, USDA, had some extra funds that they had not sent out to anybody and weren't planning to. When they heard that we were nosing around with the Office of Management and Budget and with the White House to pull back some of those funds for this purpose, for a good purpose, for infrastructure--guess what--they came up with another program. They had the discretion to send the money out under another program. So they came up with one and said: Oh, now we have got this money covered. You are not allowed to touch it. So I am just telling you that is one of the challenges with these CBO scores. They took $28.4 billion in savings and just decided, because they knew best, that this was not going to be available because the Agencies were going to spend it, even though they haven't spent it, they had no reasons to spend it, they had no plans to spend it. And, again, the Office of Management and Budget at the White House had confirmed that. Another example: We went from a savings of $65 billion from the next auction for spectrum down to $20 billion in response to concerns by colleagues on our side of the aisle that this might affect our national security. So $65 billion in savings, CBO-scored savings, in this legislation, went to $20 billion--working with the Department of Defense, carefully; working with the Office of Management and Budget; working with the Armed Services Committee here, ensuring that we weren't going to touch any spectrum in that future sale that had a national security implication. So that reduced our CBO score. We understood that, but we wanted to be sure that we weren't taking any risks by having any issue with regard to DOD spectrum that they didn't want to provide. CBO then, in their report on Thursday, decided that they weren't going to give us credit for that $20 billion. They took it down to about $10 billion. We lost $9.8 billion on a CBO score there. And, again, when we pushed on that, they said: Well, we just need to know that the White House is going to move ahead with a spectrum auction. Well, they are, and they have sent us a letter saying they are. So, again, this is a little arbitrary, don't you think? How can CBO decide? So just as they took $30 billion away from the CBO score with regard to repurposing COVID money, which is based on the unobligated balances that the White House agreed to, that OMB agreed to--but CBO is saying somehow the Agencies aren't going to spend that money. I mean, all the records, if you look at what happens, is that they will spend the money. So we are saving the money. We are pulling it back and applying it to a good purpose: infrastructure. So I would just caution my colleagues who, again, traditionally are skeptical of CBO and somehow, in this case, think CBO is perfect, to look a little closer at these scores and look at the fact that they are not necessarily accurate. What this legislation does not do--the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act--is it does not include the grab bag of massive new social spending that Democrats included in their first package and certainly that they are now including in their $3.5 trillion spending proposal they unveiled earlier this month. And this is an important point that my colleagues shouldn't miss. The President has said that the package--the $3.5 trillion--will not include more core infrastructure spending. Now, remember, that was pulled out of his original package, the $2.65 trillion. We took about half of the core infrastructure out of there and took out all the taxes, so we are at $548 billion. And he made a commitment, both privately and publicly, as have Democrats up here, that that is the negotiation on the core infrastructure. So the roads and bridges we have talked about earlier, the water infrastructure, the rail, the ports--that can't be double dipped in terms of also including that in the $3.5 trillion. Now, they will have a lot of other spending in there that is social spending, that is not this capital expenditure spending we talked about. Many of my colleagues know what capex means, that you typically borrow for your capex, and it is long-term spending for hard assets. But that is not what the $3.5 trillion is about, and that is why I strongly oppose it, as do my colleagues on this side of the aisle. The President having said that the package will not double dip, that we won't have that in there, is very important to remember because we have saved taxpayers not only huge tax increases by finding a bipartisan solution here, but we saved taxpayers from a lot of additional spending that otherwise would have occurred. This investment in repairing and upgrading our Nation's infrastructure will have real, lasting benefit for our country through building out hard assets that improve productivity and improve efficiency without adding to inflation. It will create hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs in industries ranging from construction and plumbing to electrical engineering and software development, with one recent study from the Association of Equipment Manufacturers finding that the legislation could create around half a million jobs by 2024. This is why every business group in America is supporting this legislation, as well as all the ag groups--over 30 ag groups--including the American Farm Bureau. It is why the AFL-CIO Building & Construction Trades Council is supporting it, because they are going to provide a lot of the workers for this. Even more importantly, given the recent economic news we have seen, is this proposal will not cause inflation to increase. As Democratic economist Larry Summers on the other side of the aisle and many of us here on the Republican side of the aisle had been warning about for months, including me, inflation is here, with prices for consumers up 5.4 percent over this time last year. And this rate of inflation, in my view, could well go up even further. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former CBO Director, now head of the American Action Forum, a conservative economist; Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, AEI, also a conservative scholar, has said that our bipartisan infrastructure package will slow down inflation. They said: ``Improving roads, bridges, and ports would make it less costly for businesses to operate, allowing them to increase their output per hour, and putting downward pressure on consumer prices.'' So I know some of my colleagues want to conflate these two, the $3.5 trillion extravaganza with huge tax increases and immediate social spending and this long-term spending we have talked about here, where very little money is going to go out the door even in the next year or two. But they are not the same, and I think it is irresponsible to say they are the same. The bottom line is that the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will provide a historic investment in hard infrastructure, with input from a bipartisan group of Senators, while avoiding the tax hikes that would hurt our economy, destroy jobs, and undermine our competitiveness around the world. And importantly, for the sake of future bipartisanship here in Congress, it is an infrastructure plan that allows us to avoid the repeat of the COVID-19 spending bill, the $1.9 trillion that passed under this partisan process of reconciliation. It is also the alternative way that we ought to operate around here instead of the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package that is coming next. It demonstrates to the American people that we can, in fact, work together to get big things done in a responsible way. President Biden promised to govern in a bipartisan manner, in his inaugural address and in his campaign. Unfortunately, he hasn't done that with regard to the COVID package, the $1.9 trillion under reconciliation, the $3.5 trillion that they are now going to attempt to pass here in this Chamber. But this bipartisan package is an opportunity for all of us to fulfill that pledge, to figure out how to work together to get big things done. It is a genuine compromise. It is not the bill I would write. It is not the bill my colleague Kyrsten Sinema would write on the Democratic side of the aisle. But it is good for the country. It builds our core infrastructure. It doesn't raise taxes on the American people. It will grow the economy. It will lead to more tax revenue coming in to the Treasury, and yet it includes responsible pay-fors. Soon, I hope we will all be able to vote on final passage of this legislation. As I indicated, we have already had two votes to proceed to final passage. One was 66 to 28; the other was 67 to 27. I think it is time for us to come together and to enact this bipartisan achievement for our Nation, for our economy, and for the people we represent. Cryptocurrency Madam President, I want to address a specific part of the legislation that is before us. It relates to cryptocurrency. As we know, cryptocurrency is a digital asset that more and more people are investing in, and we should want that to continue and continue in a healthy and sustainable way. There is consensus here in Washington and around the country that there should be better and more consistent reporting on cryptocurrency transactions. By the way, this would be a good thing for honest, taxpaying holders of cryptocurrency, which is the vast majority of them who, today, have to figure out their basis and sometimes their gross proceeds when filing taxes because they don't get a 1099. The form 1099 that a financial institution would give you if you invested in stocks or bonds or other financial instruments often is not available for holders of cryptocurrency, which creates problems. Standardizing this basic information reporting by crypto brokers for tax purposes is going to help provide more certainty for everyday Americans looking to invest in these digital assets. The experts at the nonpartisan Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation and the Department of the Treasury say that this would lead to better tax compliance as well. So the information reporting would lead to better compliance with the Tax Code. The question is who should issue that 1099 in a cryptocurrency context. Again, the consensus is that it should be the brokers of cryptocurrency, just as it is for stocks and bonds and other financial instruments. In the underlying bill, a broker is defined as any person responsible for regularly providing any service effectuating transfers of digital assets by cryptocurrency--which, for tax purposes, means a sale--on behalf of someone else. Some crypto brokers already comply with these standard information- reporting obligations, but for those who have not yet adopted these practices, this rule change is going to make it easier for their customers to pay their taxes due. The concern has been expressed that some in the cryptocurrency industry who are not brokers could be inadvertently caught up in this definition. The Department of the Treasury, the nonpartisan Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, and others believe that the current language is clear and that the reporting requirements only covers brokers. But my view is that we should work to clarify this, given the potential for confusion on an extremely important issue. In particular, we want to be sure miners and stakers and others, now or in the future, who play a key role by validating transactions, or sellers of hardware or software for digital wallets, or node operators, or others who are not brokers are clearly exempted. While it is not the intent of the underlying bill to include them, I believe we can do more to make this clear, which is why I will continue to work with colleagues to clarify the intent of the information- reporting language. There have been a number of amendments that have been filed to try and make this provision more clear, and I have been working with my colleagues Senator Warner, Senator Wyden, Senator Toomey, Senator Lummis, Senator Ossoff, and Senator Sinema on a potential solution that I believe will help reassure stakeholders that these individuals will not be considered brokers, while maintaining the information reporting in this bipartisan legislation. Today, we will continue these important discussions, and I am hopeful we can come to a solution that will provide certainty for taxpayers and avoid any potential loopholes for bad actors. With that, Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I thank the majority leader for allowing me to say a few words tonight, and I want to commend him and the Republican Leader, Mitch McConnell, for allowing us to have this series of amendments. The Senate has worked its will and will continue to work its will tomorrow. As was said, there have been 22 amendments on the floor. About half of them are Democratic amendments, and about half of them are Republican amendments. I will say, also, there has just been a lot of discussion that has ensued because of this amendment process. So a lot of people have had the opportunity to discuss their issues to try to improve the bill in certain ways, and, frankly, a lot of these amendments were accepted; they were voted on positively--well, one just recently with regard to a safety issue that was just discussed--and improve the bill. So that is the way this place ought to work, and I think it is consistent with what we tried to do in this process from the beginning, where we saw an opportunity to pull out core infrastructure from a much larger package and deal with it without raising taxes but by focusing on bipartisan solutions, and that is exactly what the underlying bill does. The next step in that, then, was to say: Let's try to have an open amendment process too. And sure enough, we have. I had some colleagues of mine come up to me tonight and say: You know, it is nice to see the Senate working its will again, because these are colleagues who were around in previous decades where, you know, they saw this more often. So, again, I want to thank my colleagues for going through this process. It requires some patience. It requires some consensus. Some amendments had to be altered in some ways to be sure that both sides were comfortable having votes on them. But at the end of the day, we are able to say that people's voices are being heard. This will continue tomorrow. I just saw a list of about 10 amendments, and I know there are others as well that people would like to offer tomorrow, and I am all for it, as is Senator Sinema. Senator Sinema and I are very pleased that Members have the opportunity to express themselves. I also want to talk a little about what this bill does and why it is so important for our country. For the past 2 days, we have been working through this amendment process, and sometimes we lose sight of the bigger picture here. The bigger picture is that we as a country have an infrastructure system that is badly in need of repair. We are consistently rated as a country with an infrastructure system that, frankly, hasn't kept up with the rest of the world. There is a group called the World Economic Forum, and they give a report card every couple years, and America ends up, you know, 13th or 14th in the world in terms of infrastructure. That is not where we want to be. By the way, on a broader gauge of competitiveness, we are right up at the top in terms of our trade system, our tax system, our economic system generally, but with regard to infrastructure, we are not. As some of you have heard me say before, this is about competitiveness too. Think about this: China spends three or four times more as a percentage of their GDP than we do on infrastructure. The reality, as I have looked at those numbers, is that it is even higher than that, but let's say three or four times higher. Why? Because they get it. They are trying to outcompete us in every way, including having better ports, better rail, better airports, and the ability to both buy and sell their products overseas, and we here in America want to be at the top of that list. That is why it is very important, from my point of view, that we focus on the economic impact here. If we get this bill passed, it will make our economy more efficient; therefore, more productive; therefore, the economy will grow; therefore, more tax revenue will come into the coffers. There has been a lot of discussion about the pay-fors in this legislation. We will know more as the CBO report tells us very specifically how it is paid for. But the bottom line is, much of what happens in this bill, which is spending for capital assets, this long- term spending--it is not going to be spent next year. It may be spent in 5 years or 10 years. It may be a bridge in Georgia. It may be a port in Alabama. Those take years and years and years. The funding we are providing, the $550 billion in this bill, will be spent over that period of time. It will add to those hard assets. It is, as a result of that, on the supply side of the economy, creating jobs, creating hard assets, like the bridges and like the ports, and as a result of that, it is actually counterinflationary. I know there has been concern on the floor, including raised today in one of the amendments, about the fact that more spending leads to more inflation. Not this kind of spending. The kind of spending that would lead to it is more what is called the demand side of the equation--you know, as an example, the stimulus checks or even the unemployment insurance benefits. That led to more demand in the economy. Yes, that did drive up our inflation over the past several months and continues to. This is not that. This is spending over the long haul. It will create these capital assets that will make our economy more efficient and should be counterinflationary. We have a number of economists who have spoken to this: Doug Holtz- Eakin some of you know; also Michael Strain, who is at the American Enterprise Institute. The Penn Wharton study on this is very interesting. They say, actually, that our legislation, as they analyze it, will end up growing the economy, creating more jobs, and actually reducing the deficit, meaning more money will come into the coffers than we are spending here that is not paid for with CBO-certified official scores because of the economic impact of this. So this is very important for all of our constituents. It is also important for our broader economy, to make sure America stays at the forefront and that we can be competitive for our kids and our grandkids. Let's take the State of Ohio as an example since I happen to be from Ohio and why it is going to help my State. Ohio is a big infrastructure State. We have a lot of roads and a lot of bridges. Ohio's roadway network has a lot of congestion also. It is estimated that the congestion in Ohio costs motorists an estimated $4.7 billion each year in lost time and wasted fuel. That is according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, which scored Ohio's roads at a D in their 2021 infrastructure report card--a D. Now, the Nation as a whole is only a C-minus under their analysis. Ohio is a D. So we are a little worse than the Nation as a whole. As a whole, again, we are falling behind but Ohio particularly. We are second in the Nation for the number of bridges. We have got a lot of little rivers and railroad tracks in Ohio, so we have got a lot of bridges. We have 44,736 bridges in Ohio. By the way, they have looked at these bridges. Their analysis is that nearly half of them are not in good condition. Our farmers, who are working to plant crops in their fields, want to be able to then get those crops to market. They want to get them to the elevators. They want to be able to export them. They care about infrastructure. The moms and dads across Ohio who commute to work every day would heck of a lot rather spend their time with their kids than sitting in a car in a traffic jam on, you know, I-71 or 75 or I-270 or I-70. We have got a lot of great roads in Ohio, but, frankly, they can't keep up with the demand, so we have got a lot of traffic jams during rushing hour. Those are some of the people who care a lot about infrastructure. Our manufacturers in Ohio--we make everything in Ohio. We make cars. We make washing machines. We make tanks. We are proud of what we make in Ohio and what we export all around the world. We have got to be sure to get those products to market, too, so infrastructure is really important. Today, I talked to a company in Ohio that has trucks all over Ohio and the country, for that matter. It is the Cintas Corporation. They are the uniform company, but they do a lot more than uniforms. They are excited about this bill because it is going to help them be more efficient in their delivery of their services. That is the same with our truckers. I talked to a trucking company person yesterday who was interested in how this would affect the truckstops and wanted to know about, you know, electric vehicle charging stations and so on. But the bottom line was, this person said this is going to help because our truckers want to have a safe road and a safe bridge. They want to be able to meet their requirements and not get stuck in traffic jams and be able to make more money on the road, frankly. So this is something that helps our constituents across the board. But it goes well beyond just our roads. This is also about water infrastructure in this legislation. Communities across our State deserve water infrastructure that is going to deliver them clean, safe drinking water. We have got a lot of old water systems in Ohio that need help and need it badly. We also have a lot of wastewater systems in Ohio that are in trouble. Some of you may know this, but there are new EPA rules that have come out over the past couple decades about wastewater systems and particularly combined sewer overflow systems, where when you have a lot of rain, in many of our systems in Ohio, there is a combination of the sewer system and the wastewater system, and that is not safe. Yet fixing it is really expensive. Those communities--mostly midsize cities in Ohio but some larger cities as well--have all said to me: Can you help us a little more on water infrastructure? With the revolving loan program we have in here, the ability for them to get low-interest Federal loans to be able to expand their water infrastructure system--they will be able to do that in this legislation, as well as receive grants from the Federal Government to help them ensure that we do have water systems that work. Folks in rural parts of our State--Ohio is an Appalachian State. We have about 32 counties considered part of Appalachia. And guess what. In most of those counties, we have virtually no internet. I mean, sometimes there is real slow internet you can get but virtually no internet. This is why, for some of our kids in those counties in Ohio-- these are rural counties that don't have access to Wi-Fi of a speed that is appropriate for school, much less work. These kids are falling behind, and particularly, of course, during the pandemic, when they had to rely on online learning. And the stories are out there, and you know them, and the mom that comes up to me when I am out and about in Ohio and says: You know what; I had to take my kid to the parking lot of the library, which is a 45-minute drive for me across rural Ohio roads, to be able to do her homework. That makes no sense. We want the digital divide to be closed. We want the ability for those kids in rural Ohio to have access to the internet, just as kids can get access to it in suburban or more urban settings. But even in the suburban and urban settings, we want to help be sure those kids have the hookup to their home to get that internet and to be able to afford that internet. So this legislation is unprecedented in many ways in terms of infrastructure--more roads, more bridges, more ports, more water systems--but it is also historic, unprecedented in terms of the expansion of broadband, finally. Again, this is about catching up. There are countries around the world that actually have better broadband than we do that are not even developed countries. They are poorer countries. You would think they might be a little behind, but they are sort of leapfrogging us in terms of technology because they realize how important having that internet build-out is. The other issue is for telehealth. There are more and more people relying on telehealth. Part of this comes out of the pandemic, when people kind of had to do that. They didn't want to go into a doctor's office or hospital for fear of the COVID pandemic. And, frankly, right now with the variants--and the delta variant in particular--there are some people who are still now, unfortunately, not comfortable going into a healthcare setting, but they need to have an appointment. They need to have someone to check them out, and they need, perhaps, with regard to behavioral health, to have the ability to have a consult. They can do that online now, and the Federal government has been reimbursing that for the first time, because before, under Medicare and Medicaid, that was very difficult. So this is going to be a part of our system. It is a good thing, sort of a rare silver lining in a terrible dark cloud of the pandemic that we learned how to use telehealth better. So what if you don't have access to internet? So what if you are a veteran in southeast Ohio and you have to drive 2\1/2\ hours to a VA clinic, and instead you would like to do telehealth because it makes a lot more sense for your situation, particularly during the pandemic, but you don't have internet? So, definitely, that is not fair. So telehealth is another reason for us to expand internet access. Finally, just for our economic benefit in these communities, we want more startups. We want more companies to be able to be successful. Without the internet--let's face it--it is going to be very, very difficult. These are all part of this legislation as well. The hard core infrastructure you think of--like roads and bridges, yes; water infrastructure, yes; ports, rail, freight--but also the digital infrastructure that ties our country together--that is part of this legislation as well. Again, it is why economists who look at this say this is actually going to help make our economy work better, make it more efficient. We will be more productive as a country, and we will have more economic growth and then more revenue will come in. That is why this is so popular. I mean, when you think about it, what can everybody agree on in America today? Not much. We are a country that is more divided, and that saddens me. It concerns me, particularly as we face challenges, some of which, like the pandemic, are here domestically, and some of which are global challenges brought on by some of our adversaries, like Russia or China or North Korea or Iran. But we are divided as a country. One thing that brings us together is our military. I think most people acknowledge and respect the role that our military plays. And another is infrastructure. It is an issue where traditionally Republicans and Democrats were able to come together and say: We may disagree on taxes and healthcare and all sorts of other things, but on this issue of strong infrastructure, we can come together. Again, I think it makes sense economically, and, also, it is popular. People know when they are driving over potholes or getting stuck in traffic jams or not being able to get a product because the ports are backed up, which they are right now. Our ports are inefficient and people literally can't get products. They can't get cars or they can't get an electronic device. That is all part of this. So this is something that ought to bring us together, and it does bring us together. The polling out there shows this, by the way. There are two polls in the last few months that both said that 87 percent of the American people want us to work on this infrastructure project on a bipartisan process and get it done. Those numbers were unbelievable, and it was exactly 87 percent in both polls, interestingly, even though one was CBS and one was CNBC. But forget the polls for a minute and just go home and talk to people. They do want to make sure that we are not raising taxes to do this. They don't want to see us helping the economy long-term with infrastructure but hurting the economy short-term with higher taxes. And I agree. And we don't do that here. That is what is particularly great about this approach. It is that we said that we are going to pull out core infrastructure only and we are not going to raise taxes. So we have the funds in here to be able to help with regard to our highways, our bridges, our ports, our waterways, our broadband expansion. But we also have the ability for us to do that in a way that makes sense for all Americans. In Ohio, it is going to help us do something else that is important, and that is to help with regard to some of our big infrastructure projects. I will talk about one tonight briefly--the Brent Spence Bridge. This is in my hometown of Cincinnati, OH. It is a critical bridge because it is where I-75 and I-71 come together, and therefore it is a bottleneck. Twice as many cars drive on that bridge every day as it was built for. Twice as many cars drive on that bridge every day--and trucks--as it was built for. It is the reason that there is a traffic jam there during rush hour. But it is also the reason that it is unsafe, because over time the shoulders have been removed to create another lane. So if there is an accident on that bridge, there is nowhere to go. We had an accident 2 months ago with two trucks that collided, and we had to close it down, actually, for several weeks, and it was a mess. And talk about the effect on the economy. Think about this. There are roughly 3 million people in the metropolitan area there, with Dayton and Cincinnati on one side, and the other side has about 1 million people in Covington, KY. And you have traffic going all the way north and south from Canada to Mexico, and all of a sudden you don't have a bridge available because of the safety concerns that led to the accident. So we need a solution with regard to that bridge, and we have been talking about it for years. For 25 years, I have been involved in the effort to try to find the funding to replace this bridge because it needs it. Finally, we will have the ability to do that. We will have the ability to help, with Kentucky and with Ohio and with the Federal Government working together with the local community, to complete this Brent Spence Bridge corridor project. Why? Because we are putting an unprecedented amount of money into not just bridges but bridges like this one--bridges that are major commercial bridges; bridges that are functionally obsolete, which ours have been for years; bridges that desperately need the help. We also have a big aviation industry in Ohio. We support a lot of jobs through aviation, our second biggest industry after agriculture in Ohio. There is $25 billion for new spending for airports in here. That is going to help airports build on the momentum that we need right now in Ohio to be able to expand our aerospace industry. On the shores of Lake Erie, on the north coast of Ohio, we will also have help. Lake Erie supports fishing and tourism industries that total over $10 billion. It provides drinking water for 10 million people. It is the top tourist attraction in our State, but as anyone who visits the lake will tell you, they have some serious long-term health challenges with the lake. We have invasive species. We have a problem with toxic algal blooms. We have pollution. We have rising levels of the lake. This bill helps with regard to all of that. With regard to rising levels of the lake, there are communities on the lake that will tell you their water systems don't work because the lake water has risen to the point where the outtake valve which is next to the intake valve is now actually underwater, so the system doesn't work well. In fact, the system is incredibly expensive to replace. So this will help with regard to that. As cochair of the Senate Great Lakes Caucus, I am very pleased to see this investment because it will support the infrastructure and infrastructure investments in communities all along Lake Erie and every one of our Great Lakes. Finally and crucially, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act before us helps more than 300,000 Ohio households that lack access to this high-speed internet. That is incredibly important. Our legislation does everything that I have talked about in terms of infrastructure, and that is important. Again, we have the studies out there that I talked about, including one from Penn, from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School. They talked about how the economic growth from this study will actually make our economy better and create more jobs, and they say that, actually, over time, it reduces the deficit, based on looking at our study and, specifically, our proposals. So all that is true. The final thing I guess I want to say is that it goes beyond infrastructure. It goes to how to get Washington back to a point where Washington is solving problems for the American people. And this bill is not perfect for anybody--no Republican, no Democrat. Why? It is a bipartisan compromise. You know, again, we started off with a product that President Biden introduced that was $2.65 trillion--a huge package called ``infrastructure,'' but most of it was not for infrastructure. It had huge tax increases in it--the highest tax increase, it would have been, in American history. It would have made our country less competitive, in my view. We said: OK, let's find a group of Democrats and Republicans, and let's agree to pull out the core parts of this, the core infrastructure, and find a way to pay for it without raising taxes. That is what we did, and we worked hard to create a product that was fair for everybody. But that means finding that consensus, and that is not easy. You know, we all had to make concessions, but, at the end of the day, we got a product--$550 billion over the next 5 years, which will be spread out, spent over many, many years, that will put America back on top in terms of infrastructure. It will put us in a position where, for our kids and our grandkids, they are going to have a more productive and a more efficient economy-- one that produces more, one that has the ability for America to say to the world: Look at us again. We are back. We are back. We now have an infrastructure system with our ports and our roads and our bridges, with our water infrastructure, and with our broadband that can be, once again, a model for the rest of the world and help move us forward and ensure that every American has the opportunity to succeed. So this bipartisan process in and of itself, I think, is an accomplishment of this legislation. The underlying bill is what is most important, I suppose, but just being able to show that Republicans and Democrats can come together in this town and get something done that is positive for our country, that in and of itself is an accomplishment. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

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

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, the provisions of section 80603 for the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included in this amendment provide clarity to information reporting requirements to improve tax administration and tax compliance with respect to trading and digital assets. Senator Sinema has joined me in asking the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation to make available to the public a technical explanation of section 80603, ``Information Reporting for Brokers and Digital Assets,'' of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The technical explanation expresses these Senators' understanding and legislative intent behind this important legislation. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the technical explanation of section 80603 from the Joint Committee on Taxation of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act be printed in the Record.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Chairman Carper, thank you. Thank you for managing this important legislation and all the work you have put into it. You know, I asked my team today: Can you give me a sense of how much of this underlying legislation we are talking about on the floor this week that was already written? In other words, what did Senator Capito, Senator Carper, and others on the EPW Committee, as an example, already write with regard to this surface transportation bill that we are simply picking up in this legislation and moving forward to be sure it gets reauthorized, certainly before September 30, and we hope far before that. And about half of the pages of the bill is language that was written through the committee process here. Now, some may be happy to hear that, and some may be unhappy to hear that, but that is the truth. And, frankly, it made our job easier because a lot of the hard work was done. In the case of the legislation that Senators Carper and Capito shepherded through their committee with regard to our highways and bridges, it was a 20-to-nothing vote, as I recall, out of committee, unanimous. So we thought it was appropriate for us not to tell them how to do their job but to help them by picking up that legislation, and as they have improved that legislation, their underlying authorization legislation, and ensure that it is included in the package. And I appreciate Senator Carper and Senator Capito working with us on that even over the past few weeks. So, yes, we have added more on top of it because we believe our Nation needs a shot in the arm. We have enormous infrastructure needs. But without Senator Capito and Senator Carper's involvement, 20 to nothing out of committee, we wouldn't be where we are today, and that is the foundation upon which this was built. So, again, I know that is not understood by everybody, but that is a fact. And our Nation's infrastructure does need the help. And this legislation, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act before us right now, is an unprecedented investment. It is historic, but it is that because a historic investment is needed. It is important to note that we did so without raising taxes on the American people or causing further inflation in an already overheated economy. I heard some of my colleagues on my side say: Gosh, I want to support you, but I am worried about the spending and its impact on inflation. Well, this is what the economists would call supply-side spending. This is long-term spending for capital assets that may last 40, 50, 70 years. Think of a bridge or think of another infrastructure project like a big water infrastructure project. So it is a different kind of spending. It is not going to be spent over the next year. In fact, very little, if any, will be spent in the next year, but it will be spent over time--over 5, 10 years for these kinds of projects. That is the kind of money that goes into building infrastructure and building jobs. Therefore, again, on the supply side rather than the demand side of the economy, as economists would say, it is not stimulating the economy in that way; it is growing the economy long term. Most economists who have looked at this, including economists like Doug Holtz-Eakin, who used to be here at CBO, or an economist like Michael Strain at the American Enterprise Institute or the Penn work- study at the University of Pennsylvania. They all say the same thing, which is that this is actually counterinflationary kind of spending. That is important. I will say that this is needed because we are falling behind as a country, and every State has its own needs here. I will tell you what my needs are in the State of Ohio, which is that we make a lot of stuff. So our factory workers who make tanks and cars and washing machines, we want to be sure that our infrastructure works to be able to get that to market. Sometimes that market is the United States, and sometimes it is overseas. Therefore, our ports are important but so is our rail and so are our highways. Our farmers--we have got a lot of farmers in Ohio who plant crops. We want to make sure that those crops can get to the elevators so that the grain can get out. We have a lot of people in Ohio who live in cities and commute. And so the mom who is looking at her commute every day and saying, ``Why do I get stuck in traffic at rush hour both ways and have to spend all this time in the car when I could be spending it with my kids,'' wouldn't it be great to improve those highways and those bridges to be able to reduce the amount of time that someone is stuck in a car? So this is about helping our country at a time when we need it. There is probably no better example of that than broadband because think about the child in Appalachian Ohio who has no Wi-Fi service-- like none. I am not talking about slow Wi-Fi; I am talking about no Wi- Fi. I look at my colleague from West Virginia and think of all the counties in West Virginia that are in the same shape that they are in Eastern Ohio. We are expanding broadband in an unprecedented way. The deployment of broadband into the rural community but also access in the more suburban and urban communities, that is really important because that child now can be able to do the schoolwork at home. And during the pandemic, of course, this has been a huge issue, but it is an issue every day. Rather than having to drive with her mom to the local library, which some girl might have to do in Appalachia to find a Wi-Fi signal, she can actually get it at home because of this deployment we have provided here, which is unprecedented. So all of this is in this. It is all part of it. It is important. The American Society of Civil Engineers has given our Nation a report card every year. Our report card right now is a C-minus. We get a C- minus. Now, I did get a couple C's in high school and college, so I don't think C's are always terrible, but I don't want our infrastructure to get a C, much less a C-minus. They estimate that somewhere in America there is a water break every 2 minutes. Water infrastructure is part of this. They also estimate that 43 percent of our public roads are in poor or mediocre condition. This hasn't improved in years. We are now listed 13th in the world for infrastructure in the most recent rankings by the World Economic Forum. They, every year, look at all these countries around the world and say, where do you rank? The United States is right up there. I think Singapore and the United States are some of the most competitive countries in the world, in terms of all the analysis they do, but not on infrastructure. On infrastructure, it drags us down because, frankly, we haven't invested as other countries have. The number out there that people use is that China spends four times more than we do as a percent of their economy on infrastructure. I think it is actually higher than that from the numbers I have seen. But let's say it is four times more. China gets it. They know infrastructure is important for economic growth. I talked earlier about how it makes the economy more efficient and therefore more productive and therefore you have more tax revenue generated. They get that. We have allowed our infrastructure to get to the point where we are not competitive as a country with so many others, not just developed countries either. We have cut back funding over the years, and so it is probably no wonder this has happened. The Aspen Economic Strategy Group calculated that as of 2017, our total spending on infrastructure across the public and private sectors hit its lowest point since at least 1947. So relatively speaking, we have less expenditures on infrastructure, and this lack of investment has real impact. Historian Henry Petroski estimates that the delays caused by traffic congestion alone cost our economy more than $120 billion every year. So I talked about the mom who is commuting and not being able to spend more time with her kids because she is sitting in her car--$120 billion a year is the economic impact. That is important, too. One 2017 study by the American Society of Civil Engineers estimated there was a total infrastructure gap of more than $2 trillion that we need to address by 2025; otherwise, we could lose nearly $4 trillion in GDP, economic growth, that we otherwise would have produced as a country. Now, those are big numbers. Those are big numbers. These are the engineers who say we have a gap of $2 trillion we need to address by 2025. Ours is $550 billion over the next 5 years--historic levels. Some would say it may not be enough. I think it is. And you will hear a lot about this, this week, all the different places where the infrastructure investments are made. But others would say we need to do even more. You can see that there is a need for renewed infrastructure. Let me give you a really specific example, and it is one reason I am interested in this project, honestly. For, gosh, 25 years now, we have been talking about fixing our bridge in Cincinnati, OH. It is called the Brent Spence Bridge. It is where I-75 and I-71 come together, so think about all the commercial traffic. Actually, 3 percent of the Nation's commerce goes over this one bridge every year. It is a huge economic issue for us in Greater Cincinnati. There is congestion there every day. It is a bottleneck. The bridge is busy. In fact, it is carrying twice the number of cars that it was built to carry already. There are no shoulders anymore on it because they tried to expand the lanes as much as they can. We recently had two trucks crash there partly because there is no shoulder, and the safety problems are huge on that bridge. It took the bridge out for a couple months--a huge economic impact, huge economic impact. This bridge, again, for 25 years, people have said: We have got to replace this bridge. It is not safe. It is not big enough. It doesn't connect 71 and 75 in the way that it should for our commercial activities. It is a bridge that has been deemed by the U.S. Department of Transportation as ``functionally obsolete.'' That sounds pretty dramatic--``functionally obsolete.'' Unfortunately, again, these accidents continue to happen because it is not safe. You have got 160,000 vehicles on it rather than the 80,000 per day it was designed to accommodate. It needs to be fixed, but it is really expensive, and the local community and the State just simply can't do it alone. There are critical pieces of infrastructure like the Brent Spence Bridge in States all over our country, from roads to railroads, to ports, to broadband networks that all need upgrades to stay competitive in this global economy. It is no surprise, then, that infrastructure is an area where the American people really do want action. They get it on this one. They want us to come together as Republicans and Democrats and fix this problem. There was a recent poll by CNBC saying 87 percent of Americans think it is important we invest in improving our crumbling roads and bridges. There was another poll that came out a couple months later, a very recent poll, saying--again, this is a CBS poll--87 percent of Americans support more Federal spending on repairing roads and bridges. Two polls, 2 months apart, same number, 87 percent. Eighty-seven percent of the American people don't agree on anything, but they do agree on this, which is let's fix our infrastructure. Let's do what Presidents in modern times have all said we ought to do: President Bush, President Obama, President Trump, President Biden. President Trump had a proposal for $1.5 trillion. Ours is $550 billion. President Trump is a developer, a builder, and he understood the need for infrastructure investment, but, frankly, Congress didn't work with him to get that done. There were also issues about how that was to be paid for. But I commend President Trump for raising that issue. He ought to be given some credit because we might not be talking about it. At the end, he continued to say we need to invest big time in infrastructure. Then President Biden, in his campaign, said the same thing, and when he took office, he said the same thing: We need to do an infrastructure plan. His original plan wasn't one that Republicans could support because it had huge tax increases in it and it had a lot of infrastructure that wasn't core infrastructure. That is why we came together as a bipartisan group. Senator Capito is here. She worked with the White House on this to try to come up with a way to move forward, and, again, that helped create the foundation for what we have done here. But the point is, Republicans and Democrats alike over the years have said the same thing, which is, it is time; let's fix this infrastructure. Finally, we are giving infrastructure the help it needs and deserves and giving the American people, more importantly, the infrastructure that they want. And it is a good investment. One 2014 University of Maryland study found that each dollar spent on infrastructure can generate a return of as much as $3 to the U.S. economy--$1 in, $3 out. It is smart spending if done correctly. That explains again why President Trump put forward the $1.5 trillion package, why President Biden put together a package, and why Democrats and Republicans alike up here on Capitol Hill talked about infrastructure for years. American workers need infrastructure. They don't need new taxes. That is why, in this proposal, again, we say: Let's take the taxes out. Let's pull the core infrastructure out so it is more focused on what is really needed, and let's do it on a bipartisan basis. That is what we do in this proposal. The pro-growth policies put in place by Congress through the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was very good for our economy in every respect. Wages went up, lowest poverty rate since we started keeping track of it back in the 1950s. It had a lot of very good things. Unemployment was at historic lows for many groups, including Blacks and Hispanics. It was an overall 15-year low in unemployment. We have to be sure that we are not raising taxes now because we went into this pandemic with a strong economy, and we have to come out of it with a strong economy. But infrastructure is something that we should do without raising taxes. There was a lot of discussion, after President Biden talked about infrastructure, as to whether it could be partisan or bipartisan. There were some people saying: Let's put it in what is call reconciliation, where you don't need a single Republican vote. I applaud President Biden and Republicans and Democrats in this Chamber for saying: You know what, this is one where we ought to be able to get together. If you can't get together on a bipartisan basis on infrastructure, where can you? That is why we were able to figure out a way--again, without raising taxes and focusing on core infrastructure--to ensure that the critical infrastructure we rely on every day--our roads, our bridges, our railways, our electrical grids, our water supplies, our broadband and more--will get fixed. Again, 87 percent of the American people are looking for us to do that. It is no wonder. Go home and talk to the people you represent in your State, and they will tell you this is one where we can come together. We need to deal with the infrastructure challenges we face and the digital divide that is out there. What this does not include is a grab bag of social spending priorities that the Democrats want to include in the other bill they are talking about, which is the $3.5 trillion spending proposal they unveiled earlier this month, and that is an important point my colleagues should not miss. The President has said that the $3.5 trillion package, the so-called reconciliation package, will not include more core infrastructure funding. In other words, the President has said: I propose $2.65 trillion. The bipartisan group pulled out core infrastructure and said it is going to be $550 billion. I am now not going to put the additional amount I wanted into reconciliation. Simply put, Republicans and Democrats alike, coming together to focus on the core part of this, without taxes, have ensured that the ``lot more'' is not going to be spent both on core infrastructure and on so- called social infrastructure with huge tax increases in another package. So this is the best thing for the American economy by far, to have a bipartisan proposal. The President has said that we are not going to double-dip. In other words, infrastructure won't be in the next package. He said that privately, he said that publicly, and I believe he will keep his word on that. Certainly, those of us who were involved in this will ensure that that is not part of the agreement that is violated. So we are seeing these studies come out that show that this is the right approach for the economy. We talked about the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of business proposal that says our proposal will actually increase the economy, raise wages for workers, and actually lower our national debt over the longer term. Again, because of this feedback loop we talked about earlier, it makes the economy more efficient, more productive, grows the economy, and more revenue will be coming into the economy, and, again, we do so without raising taxes. A Democratic economist, Larry Summers, and many on the Republican side of the aisle have been warning for months about inflation. Again, as I said earlier, this is counterinflationary. The bottom line is that the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will provide a historic investment in hard infrastructure, with input from a bipartisan group of Senators, while avoiding the tax hikes and the reckless spending proposed by the Biden administration. Importantly, for the sake of future bipartisan hearings here in Congress, this is an infrastructure plan that allows us to avoid the repeat of the COVID-19 $1.9 trillion spending bill that passed under the partisan process called reconciliation. It demonstrates to the American people that, in fact, we can figure out how to work together to get big things done. President Biden said he wanted to work in a bipartisan way. Well, this is a great example of it. It is a genuine effort on behalf of Republicans and Democrats to find common ground and move our country forward. I am committed to working with my colleagues here in the Senate to see this legislation through to the end. We have come a long way, and I believe we are close to achieving a historic victory for the American people. I encourage all of my colleagues to join us in supporting this Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act so that we can truly make an important bipartisan investment in the next generations of Americans. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I concur with the comments of my colleague from Arizona. She put it well. This is a really important bill because it takes our aging and outdated infrastructure in this country and modernizes it, and that is good for everybody. It is good for the truckdriver who can leave home, knowing he is going to be safer on our roads and bridges. It is good for the mom who commutes to work and is sick of waiting in rush-hour traffic on the way to work and on the way back because she would rather spend more time with her kids. It is good for the factory worker in Ohio who makes things that need to be transported. We make tanks in Ohio; we make cars in Ohio; we make washing machines. They go all over the world. Our ports--our land ports and our seaports--are inefficient and backed up. It is good for our consumers who are waiting for products from all over the world because our ports are backed up. Our infrastructure is way behind, and we will talk a lot more about that over the next couple of days with some very specific data as to how we have fallen behind, how we are not competitive anymore, how China has surpassed us in terms of infrastructure. As a percent of their economy, they spend about four times more than we do. Why? Because they get it. This helps make the economy more efficient, more productive, and, therefore, it actually returns an investment to the American people. We are also going to hear about how it is not going to increase inflation like some of the other spending that is being talked about around here, partly because it is long-term spending for capital assets. It is spending that is going to add to the supply side, meaning it is actually going to be counterinflationary and create more jobs. We hear all about that, but one thing that I do want to make sure that we hear about tonight is the fact that this process of starting from the center out has worked. People have talked about infrastructure in this city forever. President Trump had a $1.5 trillion infrastructure package. Ours is $550 billion, by the way. Five percent of his was paid for. Ours is paid for. We made a commitment early on that we were going to do two things: One, we were going to focus on core infrastructure. So, when President Biden introduced a $2.65 trillion bill and called it infrastructure, we said: Well, there is some good stuff in there, but let's pull out the good stuff, the core infrastructure because a lot of it had nothing to do with infrastructure. And, second, we said: You know what? We are not going to do it by raising taxes. We are not going to hurt the American worker more and make America less competitive in this; we are going to do just the opposite. We kept to those two principles, and I am so proud of that; that tonight we can say the amendment, the substitute amendment, is going to be offered, and it is going to keep to that commitment of $555 billion--no new taxes, core infrastructure only--and it is great for the American people. I want to thank a few people who got us here who are going to be able, over the next few days, to tell us in great detail of the role they played because it was significant on every one of their parts. First, of course, Senator Sinema; she has been the one who has kept us on track, and that has been very important, but also to my colleagues who are here tonight on the floor, Senator Susan Collins, Senator Lisa Murkowski, Senator Mitt Romney, Senator Bill Cassidy--my Republican colleagues whom we have worked with over the last 4 months-- and each has made huge contributions to this. I want to thank the White House for their work with us because they said early on: OK. We want to do this, too, in a bipartisan way. We said: OK. If you are serious, we do too. And, sure enough, we negotiated. It was tough, and we had a lot of differences, but we were able to get to this point tonight. Just as important is the group on the other side of the aisle who made this work, and I see my colleague Senator Manchin here. I see Senator Warner here. It looks like he really wants to speak. I see Senator Shaheen here, who is about to speak, and I see Senator Tester wandering around here somewhere. These are the folks on the other side of the so-called G-10 who made it happen. And then a much bigger group. So to my colleagues who also helped in the 22 working groups we had in putting this together and did such a great job, Richard Burr, Lindsey Graham, Mike Rounds, Thom Tillis, Jerry Moran, Chris Coons, Maggie Hassan, John Hickenlooper, Mark Kelly, Angus King, Jacky Rosen--11 Democrats and 11 Republicans. And then, to my friends who took us over the top the other night on the first vote we had on this, I appreciate them because they were not involved as much on the details, but they know this is the right thing for the country, and many of them did help to get us where we are: Kevin Cramer, Mike Crapo, Mitch McConnell, Roy Blunt, Chuck Grassley, John Hoeven, Jim Risch. Folks, we wouldn't be here without every one of them, and we thank all of the folks who have put so much time and effort into this. And, mostly, we got to thank our staffs because none of us would be here standing tonight, doing this, if we didn't have staff who had been working their hearts out, staying here until 12 midnight, ensuring that every single thing in this bill has been looked over carefully to make sure that we got it right. And we are getting it right tonight for the American people, for our economy, and for the future of our great country. I yield to my colleague from Virginia.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. I thank my colleague from Utah for his wise words. Yes, it is true that there was a $2.65 trillion package proposed by President Biden for infrastructure, and we are at $550 billion. So it is bipartisan. Both sides made concessions. But it is very different than what we would have seen, and again, it is an alternative with no taxes. I do want to say that there was another effort underway before we got started. Actually, Shelley Moore Capito was part of our efforts early on and then decided to try to work with the White House to come up with a proposal. They were not successful in the end of bridging the gap between where the White House was and where they were, and the bipartisan approach that we used here ended up being more successful, but we are building on the foundation that they created. So you will see Senator Capito managing this bill for our side. I appreciate her support the other day on our first vote, and I appreciate the hard work they put in to help us to be able to come to this point today. I yield back my time.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. I thank my colleague from Vermont, the President pro tempore of the U.S. Senate. I was able to listen to some of his remarks regarding Cuba. This is a truly historic time in that island country. The demonstrations, I am told, are as large as they have been since at least 1959. My hope is that the countries of the Americas, all of which I just visited--four of them down in Latin America--that believe in democracy, that believe in the ability for people to come together and gather and express their continues, that believe in strong human rights, would come together and support the Cuban people at this critical point. My understanding is, there are some opportunities to ensure that internet access continues among those demonstrating. My understanding is that there are human rights abuses occurring even now as we talk with regard to those demonstrators. I appreciate my colleague. He has spent a lot of time trying to take the Cuban relationship, which has been a fraught one, and make it better. My hope is that what we are seeing right now on the streets of Havana and elsewhere around that country will lead to a better day for the people of Cuba.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from North Carolina for his thoughts. We are on the cusp of a vote here on legislation that would dramatically change the way we conduct our elections in this country. As my colleague said, are all elections perfect? No. But I have to tell you, I am really proud of what we do in Ohio. We make it easy to vote; we also make it hard to cheat, and that is the right balance. This bill, S. 1, is called the For the People Act, but what it actually does is it strips away control from people in Ohio and elsewhere to build the right election laws in our own States and centralizes that control here in Washington, DC. That is not consistent with the Constitution or the Federalist Papers. In addition, some of those proposed changes attempt to undermine the First Amendment rights that we hold so dear as Americans. I am proud of the way we conduct our elections in Ohio, in part because we have high turnout. In fact, we had record turnout last year, and that is great. And I don't want to leave it up to Federal employees here in Washington, DC, to determine how our system should work in Ohio, which is what this legislation would do. I mentioned the Constitution earlier. It gives the primary power over election administration to the States. It is very clear about that. It also says in Federalist 59, which is Alexander Hamilton, who was the guy most interested in these Federalist issues--he said it is clear that the Federal Government should only get involved in very extraordinary situations. Last fall, 5.97 million Ohioans cast a vote--that is a record, as I said--and it represented 74 percent of eligible voters in Ohio. Despite that and despite the challenges of running the largest election in our State's history during an unprecedented pandemic, we ran what was wildly reported on the right, on the left, by the media as a secure and successful election--in fact, I think the most successful election we have ever had. Our State-run, bipartisan county boards of election, with two Democrats and two Republicans in each county, were able to do that because they know what is best for Ohio and they are held accountable. But this partisan bill claims Washington, DC, somehow knows better. S. 1 strips the power from accountable, democratically elected State representatives in my State and around the country to determine congressional districts and hands that over to a Federal panel, again, staffed by unelected, unaccountable third parties and a computer program. Again, I think it should be something that is part of what election representatives are held to account for, is how we draw our congressional districts. It mandates the controversial practice of ballot harvesting. I don't like ballot harvesting. I think it makes it easier for partisan operatives on both the right and the left to conduct outright voter fraud. It would force taxpayers to fund the political campaigns of candidates they don't support. It turns the Federal Election Commission into a tool of whichever party controls the White House. So instead of being even, it would actually be lopsided and be partisan. It seemingly contradicts the 26th Amendment by forcing States to let individuals register to vote as early as 16 years old, and then it could allow those 16- or 17-year-olds to vote by banning State voter ID laws. The vast majority of Americans support voter ID laws. It is a fact. Republicans, Democrats, and Independents think you ought to have some sort of ID when you come vote, but this bill bans that safeguard. I could list other serious flaws with the proposal, but the bottom line is that this legislation has been presented as a safeguard for democracy when it actually contains some radically undemocratic provisions. I am in favor of State-level, commonsense efforts to increase voter confidence in our elections. We absolutely should do that. We need to protect democracy by ensuring, again, that people know it is easy to vote. It is accessible. That is good. We should all want that. But we should also make it hard to cheat and be sure we have security in our elections so people know they have trust in the system, that their vote is going to count, as it should. Again, that is what we do in Ohio. I don't think this legislation furthers those objectives. Instead, I think it would amount to a Federal takeover of our election system, which has always been in the domain of the States. Our government is built on a carefully constructed framework of checks and balances, including between the branches of government. I cannot support legislation that would run so counter to what the Framers of the Constitution intended and the election system that works well in my home State of Ohio. I yield back.

Mr. PORTMAN

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

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am here to talk about the escalating crisis on our southern border. I am the ranking Republican, the senior Republican, on the Homeland Security Committee, which is a committee that has, among other things, oversight over what happens at the Department of Homeland Security and therefore at the border and with the Customs and Border Patrol and has other responsibilities. We have been looking at this issue carefully over the past few months. We have been trying to figure out how we can address this surge at the border that is really overwhelming the Border Patrol. It is obviously about people, but it is also about drugs. Unfortunately, there are more and more drugs coming over the southern border as well, which, in effect, makes States like mine, Ohio--which is not on the southern border; we are actually on the northern border-- part of the border, in effect, because we are affected by what happens down there. At one time, most of the most deadly drug, fentanyl, which is a synthetic opioid, was coming from China. Frankly, a lot of it was coming from the mail system, from our own Postal Service. We passed legislation here in this body. I have worked with Republicans and Democrats alike on it, and we have largely been able to deal with that issue, but those same drugs have now moved to Mexico, and now they are coming across our southern border. So, if you look at the amount of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids--again, the deadliest of all drugs at a time when more people are dying from overdoses in our country than ever in history--more and more of that is coming across the southern border in addition to the cocaine and crystal meth and other dangerous drugs that were already coming. This is about the immigration system not working properly and having a huge surge of individuals--family members, unaccompanied kids. It is also about not having control of that border and having this contraband come over--in the case of these dangerous drugs--that is actually resulting in overdoses and deaths all over the United States, including in my State of Ohio. So how can we tell that it is getting worse? I would just look at these numbers here. This is the latest from the Customs and Border Protection folks of its encounters at the southwest border. Remember, we had a crisis in May of 2019, which was deemed to be the worst crisis of its kind, and it was pretty bad. We had a lot of unaccompanied kids coming at that time and a lot of family members as well as individuals. The high point was here at 144,000 individuals. We are now, as of May of 2021, which was last month, at 180,000. Some of my colleagues have said: Well, it is getting better. I don't see that it is getting better, and the numbers don't say it is getting better. It is really at the point now where it is overwhelming those people whose jobs are to try to control the border. They just don't have the resources to be able to handle this. It is also overwhelming our system all the way through. A lot of this is of families and kids coming in, as an example, and we don't have the facilities to take care of these children. During this first period of time--here is the Biden inauguration. After the inauguration, this huge increase started to happen, and it was because policies were changed. A new President who is coming in has the right to change policies, but in my view, what a President doesn't have the right to do is to change policies without preparing for it. It is one thing to say we are not going to have an emergency on the southern border anymore and that we are going to do away with title 42--a provision that says, if you have somebody coming over the border during COVID, he can be turned back--and immediately the President is saying: No, we are not going to use that anymore for unaccompanied kids. They have also now not used it for most families coming over. So not having title 42 was a shock to the system. You had a situation where people were being turned away because of COVID one day, and the next day, they were not, and you can see the result. By the way, these are people who come from all over the world, but a lot come from the Northern Triangle countries--the countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Recently, the President of Honduras talked about this, and I know the President of Guatemala has talked about it. What the President of Guatemala has said, in essence, is that the traffickers, the smugglers, heard this. So they came down to our country and said: Let's go to the northern border and make that difficult and arduous journey--it is sometimes a very dangerous journey for these children--because the Biden administration has said that there would no longer be this title 42 in place so that we can turn you away at the border. In fact, he said: We want to reunite families and kids, and that means come to the border, and you can come into the country. That is what has happened. Look, I believe we ought to have a legal immigration system that is very healthy in this country. I believe in immigration. I think it is a very important part of who we are as Americans. We take more people in legally every year than any other country in the world, and that is over a million people a year. I think that has been good for our country. It is part of the fabric of our society. We should want immigrants to come but to come in a legal and orderly way. And not only is this surge overwhelming the border, but it is really not fair to all of those people who have been waiting in line for years and years to come to our country from a country like El Salvador or Honduras or Guatemala or Mexico, for that matter, people who want to come legally, people who are reuniting with their families legally here or have skills that we want in this country. We should encourage that. But this is happening in a way that is not orderly, and it is happening because there has been a change in policy. The other big change in policy is that if you come, people were told--this is after the inauguration--then if you apply for asylum, meaning that you have a credible fear of persecution back home, so you apply for asylum, you will be allowed to come into the country. In other words, there won't be an adjudication of that. There won't be a decision made. Whether you apply properly or not, you will be told you can come into the country. So I went down to the border a couple months ago and was able to go there with Secretary Mayorkas and my colleague on the committee, Senator Peters, who is the Democratic chairman of the committee, so it was a bipartisan group, and at that point, we were just overwhelmed with these children. At that point, the Border Patrol stations and the border detention facilities, which were primarily built, frankly, for single adults and were never built for long-term detention, were overwhelmed with children. You had children sleeping side by side during COVID--none of them being tested for COVID, by the way--and they didn't have blankets. They had sheets, essentially, that are--you know, no real warmth or padding. They were sleeping on the ground with pads underneath them. The system just couldn't handle it. Now, at this point, most of those children are out of the Border Patrol system, and they are into the HHS system. HHS is the Agency that is supposed to take care of these kids. They can only be in the Border Patrol custody for a short period of time. That was being violated. They were staying there much longer than they were supposed to under law, but there was no place else for them to go. So now there have been HHS facilities that have been built and opened, and these HHS facilities are taking care of these kids. I will say that some of my colleagues would say: Well, this is great news. You know, we have fewer children in Border Patrol custody; that is good. But they are still in American Government custody; they just switched from Border Patrol to HHS. HHS has had a very hard time staffing up, and there have been, as you know, allegations of abuse. Some of these contracts that have been given to the private sector to run these HHS facilities have not been done in a proper way, and it has caused problems. A lot of the people who were down there on the border helping with these kids do not have the right training. They are not trained to take care of kids--including, by the way, a lot of government employees who have volunteered to go down. God bless them. They are getting paid to go down there rather than do their work here in Washington, as an example, but they don't have the training. So this creates a lot of issues, as you can imagine, when you have thousands and thousands of these kids showing up in unprecedented numbers. So that is what we are seeing on the border because of changes in policy. Another change in policy that was made was not only were we no longer going to turn people away because of COVID without putting anything in its place to deal with all these claims, but, instead, there was a policy called the ``Remain in Mexico'' policy or the Migrant Protocol policy. Under that policy, people who came as families and applied for asylum were told: Fine, but you have to wait in Mexico rather than wait in the United States for your asylum claim to be adjudicated. Frankly, a lot of those people ended up going back home because they were not brought into the United States, into the interior, as I said earlier, as the vast majority of people have been. They were instead told: You have got to wait in Mexico. They chose instead to go back to their home, mostly in Central America, rather than wait in Mexico. Those cases, once adjudicated, those people could come back and enter into our country if they were successful in their court case. But this system is not working. If a trafficker or a smuggler goes to a family in Central America or elsewhere--there are a lot of immigrants now coming from other countries, including all over Latin America, Ecuador, and Nicaragua and other places. They say: Look, if you come with us, give me a lot of money as a trafficker, thousands of dollars, and if these kids come with me or you come with me as a family, we will get you into America, and you will have the opportunity to stay in America. You know what, I have to say tonight on the floor of the U.S. Senate that those smugglers and traffickers are probably telling the truth, and that is the problem, because when they come to the border and they claim asylum, then instead of having that be adjudicated there at the border and determined--or saying: You need to wait on the other side of the border until we adjudicate this--what I would do on our side of the border, I would do the adjudications right there rapidly. Instead, they are saying: OK. Here is a bus pass or here is a plane ticket. Go to the interior of the United States. Go to your hometown, wherever it is, whoever is listening tonight--my hometown is Cincinnati, OH--go to Washington, DC, wherever, and then wait for your court case. You need to check in periodically. Those court cases and the adjudications take years--on average, 4, 5, 6, 7 or 8 years, depending on who you talk to. Because a lot of these cases are appealed, that is maybe where you get to the 7 or 8 years. So that is a long period of time, right, when you are in the United States awaiting your court case. Why? Because there is a backlog--a huge backlog--of over a million cases. I think it is more like 1.3 million now. So that huge backlog and the lack of resources that have been devoted to the system and the fact that just because you apply for asylum, you get to come into the United States gives the trafficker the ability to say that, to say: Just let your kids come with me or come with me as a family member. Pay me a lot of money. Unfortunately, a lot of these individuals, including kids, women and girls, get abused on the trip north from mostly, again, the Northern Triangle countries--Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras up to Mexico. Obviously there are a lot of issues with crossing the border itself in terms of going across the desert, and there are some terrible stories. But the point is, they know that when they get to the United States, they are going to be told not that ``You have to turn back,'' not that ``You have to stay here until we decide whether you actually are, you know, going to get asylum, whether you qualify for it,'' but instead ``Here is a bus ticket. Here is a plane ticket. Go into the interior and wait.'' Now, let's say that individual who goes to the interior does not show up for the court case. What happens? Well, in theory, there is a group called ICE, which is part of the immigration system that then, having kept track of that person, deports the person back to their home country. That is not happening, or at least it is not happening in the vast majority of cases. For a while, it was that the administration--and, frankly, the previous administration had a similar policy for at least some time-- that we are going to focus on criminals. So those who are in the United States who are migrants coming up here who have a criminal record, we are going to deport them but not prioritize others who simply come here under an asylum claim and then do not show up at their court case or show up but do not leave the country. But if you look at the deportation figures over the last several months of the Biden administration, you will see that that is just simply not happening. In fact, there were fewer deportations last month, I am told, than there are ICE agents. So I am not sure what they are doing. But I do know that on this day, on the inaugural day, President Biden said to the world that we are going to stop deportations for a period of time. So that is added to this narrative that if you are a smuggler or a trafficker and one of these people who are taking advantage and exploiting these families and individuals and kids, you have got a narrative that is pretty strong where you can say: Hey, if you go to the border and you claim asylum, you come into the United States of America, and then we will see what happens. Unfortunately, right now we don't have a system in place to deal with that. So that is a long way of saying we have a crisis on the border, and we are not facing up to it. In a number of the hearings that I have been at on this topic, the administration witnesses go out of their way to say this is the fault of the Trump administration. Their argument is, as I understand it, that the Trump administration should have been prepared for this surge by putting in place during this time period a lot more of this infrastructure. We talked about the HHS facilities, for instance, that were not ready, and therefore kids got stuck at the Border Patrol detention facilities. Well, it is an interesting argument. I mean, they didn't have any issue here. They didn't have this surge. They did back in 2019, but they put policies in place to deal with it. You can argue whether those policies were right or not, but you can't then say: OK. They should have had all this infrastructure in place. My point is, we need to own up to our own actions, and to blame the Trump administration for what is happening now in terms of the lack of infrastructure when the infrastructure wasn't needed, frankly, given the policies they had in place, I think is, frankly, just not a very constructive use of time. We should instead be focused on, OK, how do we take this situation and make it better and deal with it? My own view, for what it is worth, is we start with enforcing the law, particularly along the border, and say to our Border Patrol: We are going to give you the support you need to be able to support keeping these drugs out and dealing with the immigration crisis in an appropriate way. Instead, we have done just the opposite. So the first thing I would do is to say: Let's support those who are on the border. Let's tell them we are going to be there for them and provide them the resources they need to do their job. One of those things, of course, is to complete the fencing that was started during the Trump administration. There are some in this body on the other side of the aisle and, of course, a lot in the Obama administration who did not support the wall; same with the new Trump administration--or, I am sorry, the new Biden administration. But the Trump administration decided to go ahead with the wall. They got the money for it. He started building it--not across the whole border but over about 20 percent of the border, which has often been misunderstood, but areas where it would make a difference, at least to slow people down. I have always been of the view that the wall is not in and of itself an answer because if you don't have technology associated with the wall, people will go under it or over it and around it. You have to have the cameras and the sensors and so on to make the wall effective. That has not been completed. What has been completed is most of the fencing, but then there are gaps in the fencing. And when I was down there, as everyone can testify who has been down to the border to see this, there are literally holes in the wall where they were going to put a gate in, but they hadn't completed it yet, and when the Biden administration came in, again, one of the things they did on day one, they said: Stop. Stop the construction--even though the contractors had already been paid to do this work. So, literally, if you go to the El Paso sector, where I was, you go to an opening in the wall, there will be the construction material there on the ground, and there are no contractors there, and the Border Patrol, you can imagine, is demoralized by this. These people have already been paid to put up the gate, but they leave the gate open. So they have to be 24/7 physically present there to keep people from coming through those openings or just--which is what they do because they don't have the people to do it--just assume you are going to have a lot of crossings there when there is not Border Patrol there. Instead, we should complete those very small sections of the wall that haven't been completed, and, again, it is mostly openings. Then we should put the technology in place. We were told when we were down in El Paso in that sector that only 10 percent of the technology had been put in place for, let's say, you know, dozens of miles of wall--not thousands, not for even the area outside of the suburban and urban areas, but in the areas where it could slow people down to give the Border Patrol a chance to be able to respond. But the technology was stopped, again, on day one because President Biden said we are going to stop construction, stop--even though the contractors had been paid for this work. So that, to me, is No. 1. Let's give the Border Patrol what they need in terms of personnel and equipment and specifically the technology. I think the technology is the most important part of this. And you do need the sensors, you do need the cameras, and you do need to know what is going on. If smugglers are coming through with a bunch of drugs and they can divert the Border Patrol, which they do, with another group--let's say a group of unaccompanied children or families, where there is a lot of processing time involved--the Border Patrol will go to the one group, spend a lot of time processing, as they have to do, and in the meantime, the group coming with the drugs will sneak across. If you have the technology in place, you can avoid that, but if you don't, there is no way to deal with that crisis. So, No. 1, let's take care of those along the border who are trying their best to do their work and don't have the support that they need. No. 2, I think we need to reinstate some asylum policies that were starting to work effectively. Frankly, they hadn't been implemented fully during the Trump administration, so it is hard to tell. But one is allowing people who want to apply for asylum to apply in their home country or in a safe third country. So think about this. I talked earlier--people who want to apply for asylum now are just coming to the border, and they are told, under an asylum claim, they can go into the interior of the United States. They are given maybe a notice to appear--actually, a lot of families are not even given a notice to appear anymore because they are just overwhelmed. We saw that, and I saw families who were literally given just a sheet of paper that had the addresses of where the ICE offices are in America, and they were told: We don't know where you are going in America, but wherever you go, go to this ICE office wherever, in your region, but no notice to appear in court. But whether they are given a notice to appear or not, they are going into the interior. Instead, what if those people applied--not taking that dangerous journey north through Mexico but instead applied in their home country or applied in a safe third country? And there were safe third-country agreements with the countries in the region--for instance, Guatemala--which, as you know, those who are in Guatemala are coming from El Salvador or Honduras or farther south. That makes a lot of sense to me. Those are discontinued for some reason. They really hadn't been put in place where they were implemented fully, but that would seem to me to be a very smart thing; that is, to tell people: If you want to apply for asylum, that is fine. Come to our consulate office and apply, or if you don't want to apply in your own country, perhaps because you do fear persecution, go to a third country and stay in a third country and apply. Doesn't that make sense? Also, I think we should--and again, these should all be bipartisan ideas--give the Border Patrol the resources that they need. On third- country asylum applications, I know for a while there were a number of Democrats who strongly supported applying for asylum in your own home country. President Obama's administration did for some time. But, third, I would require adjudication at the border. So when you come for asylum--and this is consistent with legislation that is bipartisan that Senator Sinema and Senator Cornyn introduced and I support--you have regional processing centers on the border. This will take some funds. It will be expensive because we don't have a system in place right now. As I said, there is a 1.2, 1.3 million backlog in asylum claims. That is when people have to wait 4, 5, 6, 7, years. Instead, have these on the border. Have these operations where somebody can come, claim asylum, and go before an immigration official, someone who can judge whether that asylum claim is credible or not. A little background for this, if you come from these Northern Triangle countries or come from Mexico and claim asylum, only about 15 percent--that is 1-5, 15 percent--of these asylum claims are ultimately successful. Why? Because most people who are coming are coming for economic reasons, which I totally understand. If I were a father in Honduras in a rural area and I had no prospects for a job, I would want to gather up my family and come to the United States, because you can get a lot more financial security here for yourself and your family. That is totally understandable, but that is not the basis for an immigration system because, unfortunately, there are billions of people around the world in that kind of a situation. So it needs to be based on an orderly system where, yes, people can apply, as they do every day from Honduras and come through the legal immigration system, or if they have a credible fear, they can apply for asylum. But why not do it in these safe third countries or, when you come up to the border, do it at the border? Again, let's assume 15 percent in the end qualify. Those 15 percent would be able to come in as asylees, much as refugees come into this country. It is basically the same criteria. I am not against the refugee system. I think we should accept refugees in this country, as other countries do, who have a credible fear of persecution in their own country and need a place to land. We have a successful system to do that. We have a system to resettle these people. There are agencies that specialize in that. A lot of them are private sector agencies. So I think on the border is where we ought to put the funding. These regional processing centers ought to be there to help make the decision quickly--quickly--so that people don't have to wait 4 years, but instead they get an answer, yes or no, to be able to come into this country if they apply for asylum and they qualify for asylum. Finally, I would say that we need to put a system in place to discourage illegal immigration that goes to the employer. And I know this is somewhat controversial on both sides of the aisle for different reasons, but to me, if an employer can hire someone who is illegal, because that person has documentation--say, a driver's license or Social Security card or something else that is fraudulent--there will be more and more illegal immigration because that is the magnet. I know some say that people come to this country to take advantage of our social services and not to work. There may be some of that, but I will tell you, if you go to the border and talk to these migrants-- which I have done, and I did it again a couple of months ago and did it many times before--and ask them: Why are you coming to America? They are not saying they are coming to America to get on our social welfare system. They say they are coming to work because they know they can make 5 times, 10 times, maybe even from poor areas in Honduras 15 times what they can make in their own country. And they would like to bring their families and would like for them to have a better life and maybe send remittances back to their family. Well, again, that is an issue that we need to address in these third world countries, but in the meantime we need to have an orderly system of immigration, and if you allow employers to hire people without any consequence, then, this will continue to happen. So what is the answer to that? Well, one is to have an E-Verify system that really works. That means you have to verify electronically whether someone is eligible to work in the United States. And the small business owner should not be the police officer. It should be easy to do. It should be a software system that enables them to find out immediately whether that Social Security card is fraudulent or not. That includes looking at the Social Security number online and deciding: Is this number connected to this person? It also, I think, is going to have to require a photograph and looking at the photograph and determining whether the person is who the person says he or she is. But this can be done with the new technologies that we have. Right now we have E-Verify in place, but it is not mandatory. Don't you think it should be mandatory? Because if you dry up the job opportunities for people coming illegally, then you will not have this magnet of pulling people over the border. Again, legal immigration ought to be encouraged. We ought to bring in refugees. Asylees who qualify ought to be given asylum in this country. That is who we are. We are a country that has always welcomed the stranger. But do it in an orderly and lawful way. If we don't do that, we will continue to see a border being overwhelmed. We will continue to see this. There is no reason for this to change based upon current policy. These simple steps that I talk about could all be bipartisan. This is not a partisan issue. This is an issue of commonsense approaches that have been taken by Republican and Democrat administrations over the years. We can make a big difference here. There is a small program called the Central American Minors Program, which was reinstated just this week, and it helps with regard to unaccompanied kids coming from Central America. I support that program. I am glad the Biden administration put it in place, and I have been told by Biden administration officials at the highest level at DHS that this is the answer. Well, we had something like 19,000 kids coming over the border in one month, and thousands a day. In that system in the Obama years, when it was in place, the Central American Minors Program only had 3,000 or 4,000 kids come through it over 10 weeks, or something like that. So we had more children coming over in 2 days than they did in that entire program. I am not suggesting that the program is a bad idea. Let's do that. But if you don't do these other things, too, you are not going to make a dent in this issue. And, again, our hearts go out to some of these individuals. They have a tough time in their countries, and we wish their countries were more like ours. We wish that they had more economic opportunities, more freedom, and that they had a democracy and a market system that actually works for the people. That is not the reality now. I know the administration is focused on saying the answer to this question is dealing with the push-backers, dealing with, as Vice President Kamala Harris said during her trip, the source of the problem, which is the poverty in Central America. Well, I will say, No. 1, there are migrants coming from all over the world, from Central America, of course--and that continues, and that is a very poor part of our hemisphere--but also from many other countries, including Mexico, including people from Romania, from Yemen. I am just looking here--from Ecuador, from Colombia, from countries all over Latin America. So it is a big problem. Again, there are billions of people in the world who unfortunately don't have the kind of lifestyle that we have in this country and aspire to it. So you have to have an immigration system of some kind. Second, I would make the point that the administration is talking about spending $4 billion in Central America. I suppose that is over the next few years. It should be noted that we just spent $3.6 billion on economic development in those same countries over the past 5 years. So I am for that. I think we should be helping these countries develop. I was for a trade agreement with these countries to try to encourage their economic development. I am for helping to deal with the corruption and dealing with the kind of lack of transparency and lack of opportunity in these countries. That is all good. The judicial system and the rule of law need to be strengthened--no question about it. I am for doing that. These countries are in our hemisphere. They should be treated, in my view, differently than even countries elsewhere in the world because they are close to us. They are our neighbors, essentially. But that is not going to solve the problem--certainly, not during my lifetime. It will take decades, and it doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. And we have been doing it. Some $3.6 billion of hard-earned taxpayer money has gone toward this in the last 5 years. But I don't think it is honest to tell the American people: If we just spend a little more money in Central America, this problem will be solved. Wouldn't that be nice, if we could wave a magic wand and it could be solved and suddenly those countries would be prosperous and free? It is going to take a long time. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't be doing it, but in the meantime we have to come up with a system that is lawful, that is orderly, that is humane, and that deals with this problem. And by putting our heads in the sand or blaming the previous administration--again, here is their record--that is not going to solve the problem. In fact, it is going to create an impression that the problem is easy to solve, which it is not. It is a difficult problem-- no question about it. And broader immigration reform is something that is needed--no question about that. But, in the meantime, let's focus on the border. Let's do these simple things. Let's support the Border Patrol. Let's be sure that they have what they need in terms of technology. Let's be sure that we are doing all we can to have asylees apply in their country, or, if not, in a third country. If they come to our border, let's adjudicate those claims at the border, because then the next group will say: Well, I am not going to get to come into the United States and wait for 4 or 5 years and get embedded in the community. I am going to have to have my case decided at the border. It is much more likely that those traffickers, those smugglers who are exploiting these people are not going to be able to say--again, with some credibility right now: Hey, you come with me. You pay me a lot of money. I will take you not just to the border, but you will get into America, and you will be able to have a life there because you won't be deported. That is what they can say now. We want them instead to be saying: Well you are going to have to have your case adjudicated at the border, and you may be qualified. Again, 15 percent have made it through, and those are people who should be taken care of, in my view, as asylees. But for those other individuals, they will know that it is much better to apply legally, to go through the system, and to have the opportunity to go through an orderly, legal process. So I hope that the administration makes some of these changes quickly because I don't see this situation getting any better. In fact, in May it got worse, despite everyone saying from DHS, with whom I spoke: Don't worry. Things are getting better. I don't see that. There is a looming date--I think it is the end of July--when title 42 will no longer apply to single individuals. Right now, title 42, which I talked about earlier, which is where, because of COVID, the United States government is turning people away at the border. Right now, this is happening with regard to single individuals. When title 42 ends, which it will at the end of what is the COVID-19 public health emergency, which expires soon, then what is going to happen? Well, I can tell you, the Border Patrol is very, very nervous about that. That is one question they ask me repeatedly: What are we going to do when we can't use title 42 and when people know that, when they come into this country, they are not likely to get deported? That is a short-term issue we have to deal with. Congress could extend title 42 for now. We still have a COVID issue, not just in this country. Thank goodness we are getting over it, but it is a much bigger issue, unfortunately, south of the border, in all of these countries we talked about, including some of these countries in South America that are having a serious issue right now with COVID. You could continue with it, in my view, as a public health emergency. But, in any case, let's not do this--get rid of, as an example, title 42 without preparing for it. Let's be sure there is in place something else, something better to be able to deal with the obvious surge that we have seen. So I appreciate the fact that this is a tough issue, and I know that some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle would probably prefer that we not get into these difficult issues because they are hard. I do see that the Presiding Officer has now arrived, with whom I have worked quite a bit on this issue, and we have a specific piece of legislation that helps to deal with this issue, that helps to deal with the surge. That legislation is bipartisan. It creates a strategic plan and a contingency fund for immediate needs at the border when there is a surge to deal with the DHS issue I talked about earlier when the Border Patrol just gets overwhelmed. That is another part of what we ought to do, is to be honest about the problem and to deal with it. It is called the Border Response Resilience Act, and it enables the Department of Homeland Security to respond to the worst immigration crisis that we have had in at least 20 years. I would hope that--again, that is a bipartisan approach--that we could at least pass that and then take the other four steps that I talked about to ensure that we have an orderly system that actually works and to be sure we can retain the sovereignty of our border, keeping the list of drugs out, like synthetic opioids and like fentanyl, that are killing so many Americans, and that we have an orderly and lawful and humane immigration system. With that, I yield back. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to recognize the achievements of a friend of mine and a great Ohioan, John Payiavlas, who recently celebrated his 90th birthday. John was born in 1931 to Greek immigrants Anthony and Paraskevi Payiavlas in Warren, Oh. At the age of 20, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and underwent basic training at Fort Riley in Kansas. In 1952, he was deployed to South Korea, where he joined U.N. forces in supporting South Korea as part of Fox Company, 7th Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division. He later transferred to the Greek Expeditionary Force Batallion--one of four Greek Americans to serve in this batallion--and was awarded the Commander's Silver Cross of Valour for his exemplary service. He was honorably discharged in 1953 as sergeant first class. John and his wife Marisa, who this year will celebrate their 65th wedding anniversary, were married 3 years after John returned home to Ohio from the service. In 1960, John purchased a small company called Automatic Vendors, which later became a multimillion-dollar corporation known as AVI Foodsystems. Since its inception, AVI has served customers in more than 6,500 locations across the United States and has become the largest independently owned and operated contract food service company in the Nation. Currently, the company provides vending, institutional dining, and coffee service operations to companies across America. Today, John Payiavlas runs the company alongside his children, Anthony and Patrice Kouvas. The Payiavlas family has made tremendous contributions to their community, including a generous gift of $500,000 to Youngstown State University for their new sports media center. In 2006, John and his wife were honored with the Cleveland Clinic's Distinguished Fellow Award for their support of the clinic's initiatives, such as the Heart and Vascular Institute, the Taussig Cancer Center, and the Glickman Urological Institute. John Payiavlas has received numerous accolades for his accomplishments. In 2000, John was inducted into the Business Hall of Fame of Northeast Ohio's Inside Business Magazine. In 2016, he was honored for his service in the Korean war with the Washington Oxi Day Foundation's Jaharis Service Award. In addition, John holds the highest honor in all Christendom for a lay person as an Archon Depoutatos of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which dates back to the fourth century in the Greek Orthodox Church. The service and achievements of John Payiavlas extend well beyond the State of Ohio, and I applaud the lasting impact his success will have on our future generations.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I am here to join my colleague from Iowa who just spoke and others to talk about the President's budget. The budget is comprised of a couple of things. One is what the spending is going to be for the country. The spending, which is unbelievably high and at unprecedented levels of spending at a time of unprecedented deficits and a long-term debt that is at the highest level ever, is concerning. The second is that the budget is about revenue. So on the spending side, we all expected it to be a very high number--over $6 trillion in new spending--but on the tax side, we also have huge new tax increases. The Senator from Iowa just said it is the largest tax increase in the history of the country. He is the former chairman of the tax-writing committee, chairman of the Budget Committee here, and he has been through a lot of tax increases over the years. This is the largest one in the history of the country. It is coming at a time when you don't want to raise taxes because we are coming out of this pandemic, trying to get the economy back on track. One reason that we were in good shape before COVID-19 is because we actually put in place some tax reforms and some tax cuts that really worked. Let's be very specific about that. In the months just before COVID-19 hit, we had an economy that was hitting on all cylinders in every respect. In February of that year--so February before the COVID-19 crisis hit--we had the 19th straight month of wage growth of over 3 percent. That was great news in my home State of Ohio, I will tell you, because we had years of flat-rate growth, even declining growth, when you take into account the effects of inflation. So we had really nice wage growth. And guess who was made the beneficiary of that wage growth. It was lower and middle-income workers, which is also something you would all think people would hope for in this Chamber. That was partly because the tax cuts the government put in place in 2018 from the 2017 Republican bill provided tax relief to middle-class families, doubled the standard deduction, doubled the child tax credit, lowered the tax rates, and put more money into people's pockets. And the 2017 reforms also spurred needed investment in our communities, growing economic opportunities, particularly in low-income neighborhoods. And the reforms on the corporate side--on the international side and on the corporate side--generally meant that more companies were investing in America, creating more jobs and investments here rather than overseas. At the time, the Congressional Budget Office did an analysis of the lower corporate rate, as an example, and said that 70 percent of that benefit was going to go to workers in terms of their wages and salaries. That is exactly what we saw. So, again, there were 19 straight months of wage growth of over 3 percent in February before COVID hit. By the way, also in that time period--the year before COVID hit--we had the lowest poverty rate in the history of the country. Let me repeat that because I think it would be a surprise for a lot of people to hear this who are so critical of the tax reforms in 2017 on the other side of the aisle, saying this is not going to help ordinary people. Of course, it did. We talked about the wage growth, but also the lowest poverty rate in the history of our country. We also saw a 50-year low in unemployment. We saw record low unemployment among certain groups of Americans, including Hispanics, Blacks, and Asian Americans. We also saw a situation where there were a lot of jobs being created that were higher wage jobs because wages were going up, and we had the kind of opportunity economy that everybody in this Chamber should hope for. What is this budget saying? This is the budget, again, that President Biden has just put out. He has said: Let's get rid of all that tax reform and those tax cuts. Virtually, every one of the 2017 tax cuts expires under his budget or is ended now before it would normally expire. Let me repeat that: The budget that they put out wants to increase taxes, and that includes taxes on everybody, including the middle class. In only a few months in office, the Biden Administration is committed to spending about $6 trillion. Again, just put this in context. That is bigger than the annual budget of the United States. When you add up all the plans the President has put out there, it is $6 trillion in new spending. One of the problems with that has been that it has primed the pump. In other words, it put so much stimulus into the economy that it has created inflation. That was something that was warned by Republicans, including me and others, but also Democrats, like Larry Summers, who is a Democrat, an economist, and former Secretary of the Treasury. Unfortunately, it looks like that prediction was correct because inflation is up. If you ask folks back home about it, they will say: Yeah, I went to the gas pump, and it was $3.50 a gallon That is what I heard last weekend. That is what I experienced myself. Also, it is the price of food. Certainly, it is the price of materials. If you are trying to build something today and you want to buy some plywood, good luck. The costs have skyrocketed. This inflation is real and it is happening, and people are feeling it. In a way, that is a hidden tax, isn't it? If everything costs more, it is sort of a regressive tax that is built into the system. That is what is happening when we have inflation. We are also seeing pressure on interest rates, of course, which is going to make it harder on people to buy a home, buy a car, to be able to get by. This $6 trillion has made a difference in the sense of sending a message out from the Democrats that we would like to spend much more, but they already did spend quite a bit that has primed the pump--$1.4 trillion in a COVID package, as an example. By the way, that $6 trillion, when you add it up, is about six times more than the government spent in response to the Great Depression. That is adjusted for inflation. I am talking about inflation-adjusted terms. It is about six times more than the government spent in the 1930s in the Great Depression. It is a very radical budget, really, both on the spending side and on the tax side. The philosophy of more and more spending at a time of record debt and record deficits isn't going to help our economy recover. I think it is simply going to drive inflation, as we talked about, put pressure on interest rates, keep people out of jobs, and put more financial pressure on everyday Americans. Instead, what we ought to do is help people get back to work. COVID- 19, thank God, is finally passing. In my own State of Ohio, we are finally opening up again because our COVID-19 rates are so low. The vaccines are working. I encourage people who haven't been vaccinated to step forward and do it because it helps you and your family and also our communities to be able to recover more quickly--get people back to work and back to school, get our children back to school and get back to our churches and our synagogues, and get back to our normal life. It is starting to happen, and it is exciting. One of the problems is, again, higher inflation, higher interest rates, and also that there just aren't adequate workers out there, in part, because the government is paying more and more for unemployment insurance--$300 in Federal supplement on top of the normal unemployment in the States. There are still 25 States that have that, and this means that people often are making more on unemployment than they would be making at work. On average, about 42 percent of people, with the additional $300, are making more on unemployment than they were at work. That creates a little disincentive. There are other disincentives, too, out there to go back to work. As a result, there are 9.3 million jobs open in America. That is the latest figure from the Department of Labor based on the April numbers. We don't have the May numbers yet, but 9.3 million is a record number of job openings in America. We never had this many jobs open. This is a problem because if you don't get people back to work and filling these jobs, some of these companies are going to downsize. Some will leave our shores for elsewhere, where they can find workers. Others, frankly, are automating. You could argue that may be a more efficient, economic decision, but I don't like to see that. I don't like to see that. I think the technology and the automation, where appropriate, are great, but I want to see people get jobs where they get the dignity and self-respect that comes from working, and they get the opportunity to have a fulfilling life with work. So 9.3 million jobs are open. Let's fill those jobs. Let's not do this incredibly high spending level talked about in this budget. Let's not raise these taxes at a time when we are finally seeing economies start to rebound after COVID-19. Let's get back on track. We had a great economy--an opportunity economy--before COVID-19. That is what we want to return to. I yield back.

Mr. PORTMAN

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

Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I am here on the floor of the Senate this evening to commemorate the 77th anniversary of D-day. This was a huge turning point in World War II, of course. The invasion of Normandy occurred 77 years ago yesterday. Historian Douglas Brinkley wrote that D-day was the single most important moment in the 20th century and one of the most tragic, too, in terms of loss of life. I think he was right. There were 160,000 soldiers who crossed the Channel that day to begin the campaign to recapture Europe from Hitler's rule. On their backs were rucksacks with 80 pounds of gear, but so too was the fate of all of us--our allies in Europe and, really, the fate of the free world. Many of our best and brightest young Americans did fall that day. We lost more than 10,000 men in 1 day. The Nazis had spent 2 years fortifying the coast to prepare for this moment. It was Hitler's so- called Atlantic Wall. The beautiful coastline of Northern France was covered in barbed wire, land mines, and bunkers, but at the end of the largest amphibious invasion in history, we stood victorious, battered but not broken. On we marched through France, through Belgium, and, finally, into Germany itself. But even today, amid the flowers and fields of Normandy--I have been there, and many of you have been there who are listening tonight--you can feel, even today, the lingering presence of those who died that day in the service of liberating Europe, and you can see it in the stark, orderly U.S. military cemeteries, where row after row of white crosses and Stars of David commemorate those brave souls who were lost-- representing lives lost in a noble cause. Though much has happened in the following 77 years, we can never lose sight of the valor and the sacrifice by our Armed Forces on that 1 day. On Memorial Day, about a week ago, I spoke at the National Veterans Memorial and Museum in Columbus, OH. It was a hopeful day for me not just to have so many people together as we emerged from COVID-19-- really the first big public event they have had--but also to see the generations of veterans and family members there to honor the fallen: World War II veterans, Gulf war veterans, Korean war veterans, Vietnam veterans, and veterans, of course, from Afghanistan and Iraq. They represented the living embodiment of the stories we ought to be remembering from a war that recedes further into the past with every passing year. They are the stories of valor like that displayed by Jim ``Pee Wee'' Martin from Dayton, OH. On that day, he and the rest of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment parachuted behind German lines in the dark of pre-dawn. Jim was wounded but fought bravely, earning both the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star for his efforts. They are the stories of sacrifice like that of the Napier brothers of Warren County in southwest Ohio, the county my mom is from. All five of the brothers served in the war, and two of the five brothers landed at D-day. One died there on the beaches, never to return to his Ohio home. These are stories to be preserved for generations to come. The memory of D-day and, indeed, of all of World War II must never be lost. Since I have been here in the U.S. Senate, I have often come to the floor on D-day to recite the special prayer that was given that day by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was expected, of course, that FDR would give a speech when the invasion took place--one of his fireside chats from the White House--but for some reason, FDR was moved to prayer. The famous prayer that he gave that day has become known as the D-day Prayer. It is a powerful statement, my favorite Presidential statement and one that deserves to be remembered for generations to come. In 2013, I introduced legislation, called the World War II Memorial Prayer Act, which directs the Secretary of the Interior to install a plaque to be placed at the World War II Memorial, on the National Mall, with the words of the D-day Prayer. It is a beautiful memorial, but, frankly, some more interpretation wouldn't be a bad thing, and having that prayer there, as you will see in a moment when we recite it, would be an appropriate way to pay tribute to those who lost their lives that day. It was the Ohio Christian Alliance President, Chris Long, who first came to me with the idea of a plaque to display this historic prayer. That legislation was actually signed into law with the help of Senator Joe Lieberman. On a bipartisan basis, we got it passed in 2014. The friends of the National World War II Memorial and the National Park Service, since that time, have worked with us to develop and refine the final permanent plaque design. Most recently, they received design approvals from the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission. It takes a while to get things done on the National Mall, I found. There is quite a process. It has now been 7 years, longer than World War II itself. Despite the hurdles, we have yet to see the final plaque installed, but it will be done, by the way, not at any cost to the taxpayers, meaning private fundraising, not taxpayer dollars, will be used. We had hoped to have the final plaque in place for the 75th anniversary. In the meantime, in 2019, we were able to have a temporary plaque in place with the words of the prayer at the permanent location for the permanent plaque, which is at the Circle of Remembrance, next to the World War II Memorial. If you are on The Mall and you are coming from the Capitol, it will be on your right. It is north of the World War II Memorial but right next to it. In this very beautiful place, the Circle of Remembrance--a good place to sit and reflect--you will see, right now, the plaque is there, and you can read the prayer. The permanent plaque will be even bigger and will allow even more people to have access to it. I encourage people to go see that plaque. By the way, I think it is the only prayer on display on our National Mall. The temporary plaque, by the way, was generously donated by the Friends of the National World War II Memorial. We are very hopeful that the permanent plaque will be placed at the circle next year. I want to thank the Lilly Endowment for its generous support of this project, by the way. Last October, it provided a $2 million grant for the construction and installation of the permanent plaque. This committed financial support will be critical to finally bringing the project across the line. The fact that a prayer was offered that day by our Commander in Chief is historic in and of itself, but it is the content of the prayer that makes it so worthy of remembrance. I would now like to read this World War II D-day Prayer, if I may. My fellow Americans [FDR began]: Last night, when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far. And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer: Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith. They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard, for the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will [prevail]. They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest--until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war. For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and good will among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home. Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom. And for us at home--fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas--whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them--help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice. Many people have urged that I call the Nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts. Give us strength, too--strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces. And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be. And, O Lord, give us Faith. Give us Faith in Thee; Faith in our sons; Faith in each other; Faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose. With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister Nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil. Thy will be done, Almighty God. Amen. A powerful prayer. I love the part about they come not to conquer; they come to liberate. The same can be said for our Armed Forces throughout the ages. I look forward to seeing these words of prayer permanently displayed on the National Mall to help us memorialize such a noble day we must never forget. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

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

Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I rise today in strong support of the Safeguarding American Innovation Act. This is legislation that has been included in the substitute amendment to the bill we are working on this week, called the Endless Frontier Act, or as it has now been called, the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act. Well, if our goal is to increase U.S. competitiveness and encourage more U.S. innovation, we have to not only invest in research and innovation, we have to be sure that we are keeping our investment in research and intellectual property from being taken by our competitors and used against us. That is what this legislation does. By the way, that is just common sense, or so you would think, but that is not what we found during a bipartisan investigation during the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Instead, during a yearlong inquiry, we uncovered that our government and our research institutions over the last couple of decades have permitted China to take advantage of a lax U.S. approach to safeguarding our taxpayer-funded innovation, be it in our college campuses or in our research labs, nor was law enforcement, principally the FBI, doing anything significant to combat this threat. In fact, at our hearing on the report about 18 months ago, the FBI admitted in sworn testimony that they have been asleep at the switch, essentially. Our PSI investigation detailed the rampant theft of U.S. taxpayer- funded research and intellectual property by China by way of their so- called China recruitment programs, mainly the Thousand Talents Plan. China uses these plans to systematically find promising researchers and promising research that China is interested in, and they recruit those researchers. These programs have not been subtle. The Thousand Talents Plan is perhaps the best understood of these programs, although there are actually a couple hundred of them. Our PSI investigation documented how the Thousand Talents Plan was used to target and steal taxpayer-funded research and IP for at least two decades in this country, and much of that research and innovation was taken from our labs to China and went directly into fueling the rise of the Chinese economy and the Chinese military. While this is what China has done and continues to do, this is really about us. We have to get our own house in order. Specifically, we found that the Chinese Government has targeted promising U.S.-based research and researchers. Often, this research is funded by U.S. taxpayers. We spend about $150 billion a year on taxpayer-funded research in places like the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy for basic science research. And with this legislation we are talking about tonight on the floor, the Endless Frontier Act, we are talking about a huge increase in the amount of Federal spending for this kind of research. The annual $150 billion that has gone out over the years has been a good investment of taxpayer dollars, I believe. Why? Because it has led to some amazing things, from cures for everything from viruses to particular kinds of cancer, to technologies that support our defense base, to manufacturing technology that has made us more efficient as a country. But it is not good if the U.S. taxpayer is paying for this good research, and then China is taking it to fuel their own economic and military rise. China has not just stolen some of the research funded by U.S. taxpayers; China has actually paid these grant recipients to take their research over to China at Chinese universities--again, universities affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party. They have been very clever about it. They want to be sure that China is a stronger competitor against us, and they take the research delivered from the United States to what is referred to as shadow labs in China, where they replicate the research. Rather than pointing the finger at China, we ought to be looking at our own government and our own institutions and doing a better job with the things we can control. Again, let's get our own house in order. We have made some progress in doing that. Following our November 2019 PSI investigation I talked about and the report we issued, in December of 2020, John Demers, the Assistant Attorney General for National Security and head of the Justice Department's China Initiative, announced that more than 1,000 researchers affiliated with China's military left the United States following a crackdown on recipients of taxpayer-funded Federal grants concealing their affiliation with China's Thousand Talents Program. One thousand researchers left the United States. That news followed multiple guilty pleas and a string of arrests of academics affiliated with American universities for alleged crimes related to concealing their participation in China's talent recruitment programs while accepting American taxpayer funds and taking research to China. After two decades of allowing this activity to go on, over the past 18 months, we have finally begun to crack down. In my own State of Ohio, in my home State, there have been some researchers who have been arrested. However, as our investigation found and law enforcement told us, the Federal Government is limited in the actions they can take under current law. It is our responsibility in Congress to change that. All of the arrests in connection with the Thousand Talents Plan have been related to peripheral financial crimes, like wire fraud and tax evasion, not the core issue of the conflict of commitment, conflict of interest, the taking of American taxpayer research, and also taking money from China. Why? Because it is not currently a crime to knowingly hide foreign research funding on a Federal grant application, as an example. In other words, if you are performing research funded by the U.S. taxpayer and also being paid by China to do the same research, there is no law that states you have to disclose that funding from China. That is just wrong. Since our report, the National Institutes of Health has started to require that that information be disclosed. The NIH is alone so far in requiring that. But even there, there is still no law requiring disclosure. The arrests made since our PSI report have not been about that core issue of researchers hiding foreign funding from China and stealing our research. So we need to change the laws so we can give our law enforcement community the tools they need to go do the job that all of us expect is being done. The Safeguarding American Innovation Act goes directly to the root of this problem and makes it punishable by law to knowingly fail to disclose foreign funding on Federal grant applications. While this is a criminal statute, it is really about transparency, which is a core tenet of the U.S. research enterprise. Our bill also makes other important changes informed by our investigation. It requires the Office of Management and Budget, OMB, in the executive branch to streamline and coordinate grant-making between the Federal Agencies so there is more continuity, accountability, and coordination when it comes to tracking the billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded grant money that is being distributed. Again, the underlying legislation here in the Chamber tonight is about more money going into research. Let's be sure that there is transparency and that we know how it is being distributed. We found in our investigation that this kind of coordination and transparency was sorely lacking and long overdue. Our legislation also allows the Department of State to deny visas to foreign researchers coming to the United States who they know are going to exploit the openness of our research enterprise to acquire sensitive and emerging technologies against the national security interests of the United States and to benefit an adversarial foreign government. This may surprise you, but the State Department can't do that now. It is a loophole in the law. In finalizing our language for the substitute, we worked very closely with career State Department employees, who were desperate to get this authority to keep, say, members from the People's Liberation Army, who are definitely connected with the Chinese military, from coming over here and attending conferences where sensitive, export controlled technology is being talked about and distributed. Our bill also requires foreign institutions and universities to tell the State Department whether a foreign researcher will have access to export controlled technologies and also to demonstrate to the State Department that they have a plan to prevent unauthorized access to any export controlled technologies at the research institution That is really important. It seems like basic information that the State Department would get here, that would have been provided all along, but it hasn't been. Providing this information as part of the visa process should also help streamline the process for the State Department and for these research institutions. I think it is good for both to make sure that this is clear and we know what the rules are. We also require increased transparency in reporting foreign gifts and contracts at our colleges and our universities. Those schools are now going to need to report any foreign gift or contract worth $50,000 or more. The current threshold is $250,000. More transparency is a good thing. We also empower the Department of Education to work with these universities and research institutions to ensure that this can be complied with in a way that doesn't create undue redtape and expenditures. That is not the idea. The idea is to have transparency but have it be something that is efficient. But we also allow the Department of Education for the first time to fine universities that repeatedly fail to disclose these gifts. We have actually found that about 70 percent of universities weren't following the current law, partly because there was no fine. There was really no accountability. All of the changes that I have outlined are necessary to help keep America on the cutting edge. In order to be globally competitive, we have to be more effective at pushing back against the specific threat from China and from other nations, like Russia, Iran, and North Korea, looking to steal our research and our intellectual property. Until we start to clean up our own house and take a firmer stance against foreign influences here in this country trying to take our research, we are going to keep losing the innovations that we create here, and we will be less competitive. That is why the Safeguarding American Innovation Act is so important to be included in this bill. I will finish by noting that this has been truly a nonpartisan effort--not just bipartisan but nonpartisan--from the start. We wanted to ensure that, in a thoughtful, smart, and effective way, we were responding to the very real threat that we identified from China and other foreign adversaries. I want to commend my partner in our PSI investigation and cosponsor of our legislation, Senator Tom Carper. I also want to thank the Presiding Officer tonight for her role in this, for her contributions and her support. I also want to say that I appreciate Senators Peters and Schumer and their staff for working with us to finalize the language, as well as the State Department and other officials from the Trump administration and the Biden administration who provided important assistance. Safeguarding American innovation is always a good idea, but it is particularly important in the context of the legislation before us that provides exceptionally large amounts of Federal money for research to make us more competitive. I support that research, but I don't want the taxpayer funds to go in the front door and then to have the research go out the back door to China or other adversaries. That is not what this should be about, and thanks to this legislation being included in this law, I feel confident that it will not be about that. I yield back my time.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, let me say that I agree with my colleague from Oklahoma who just talked about the impact of the Federal supplement on unemployment that was passed here in this Chamber and signed into law by the President. It is time to end it because the situation has changed dramatically, hasn't it? Back when the unemployment additional benefit from the Federal Government was put in place, we had people who couldn't go to work. Thanks to COVID, businesses actually were shut down, many by government edict. There were people who lost their jobs through no fault of their own. Therefore, this Chamber stood up and said: OK, for those people, we ought to provide a Federal supplement on top of the State unemployment insurance in order to make them whole, essentially. Initially it was $600. Now it is $300. That is on top of the State unemployment. Now you have an exact opposite situation. You have all these jobs that are open. I just learned that in Oklahoma, it is a record number. Guess what. It is a record number nationally as well: 8.1 million jobs are being offered right now. That is more jobs than we have ever had open in the United States of America, and it is happening right now. At the same time, you have people on unemployment insurance who are getting the additional $300 on top of the State benefit. In Ohio, the average is $360 plus $300, so 660 bucks a week. Plus, the first $10,000 is not taxed. So if you are a truckdriver making 40,000 bucks a year, you are being taxed, but if you are on unemployment insurance, your first $10,000 of UI is not being taxed. How is that fair? Well, it creates an additional disincentive to go to work. I am not saying it is the only reason people aren't going back to work, but if you talk to the small business folks in your State, you will find it is one of the big reasons. I think it is the biggest one. Another one is that people are having tough time finding childcare. I get that. Childcare is expensive. Part of the solution to that, of course, is to get the kids back to school. Fifty-four percent of K-8 schools are back in business, but the rest aren't. Schools being closed makes it really tough for parents to go back to work because one parent has to be there to take care of the kids. That is true. Then, finally, there is an issue of the skills gap. I get that. The jobs that are available, some of them are skilled jobs. There are 720,000 manufacturing jobs in America open right now--right now. Yet a lot of them do require a skill level that, unfortunately, our system of education and training has not prepared people for. This is why our young people need to be given more opportunities to get those industry- recognized certificates to become a welder or become a technician or become a coder in the IT world or become a truckdriver, because we need those skills badly. But the biggest reason, again, that I am hearing all over my State of Ohio is the fact that people are saying: You know what, I am making what I can make on UI, and that is more than I can make at work. For 42 percent of Americans, on average, that is true. Forty-two percent are making more on UI. That is not even including the fact that the first $10,000 is tax-free. In Ohio, it is more than double the minimum wage. That is what people are making. So this is a problem right now, and we should face it. By the way, it is in the interest of everybody to resolve this issue. It is in the interest of the small businesses that can't find people. Some of these businesses are literally shutting down. Geordie's, a restaurant in Columbus, OH, is closed. They literally closed because they can't find workers. Other restaurants all over the State of Ohio are going 5 days a week instead of 6 or 7 days a week or cutting a shift because they can't find workers. So it is definitely helpful for those small businesses and for all businesses, but, second, it is great for the taxpayer to not have to pay that extra 300 bucks a week. It is billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars, even hundreds of billions of dollars when it is all added together, compared to what it would be under current law, where the $300 supplement goes until Labor Day-- Labor Day--with 8.1 million jobs open right now. Finally, I would argue it is particularly good for workers to get back to work, to get back to their careers, to get back to the training they need to keep up with what is going on at work. It is not in anybody's interest to have folks not back in the workforce. We should all want people to be back at work getting the fulfillment you get from work and the dignity and self-respect that come from work, but getting a paycheck and getting healthcare insurance again and getting back into their 401(k) plans and, again, closing that resume gap so they are up to speed on the training. I will tell you what is happening, and this is what concerns me and I think should concern every Member of this Chamber. Businesses are adjusting. Do you know what they are doing? They are not just shutting down. They are not just closed 2 days a week. They are not just cutting out a shift. Some of them are changing the way they operate in order to be more efficient. What does that mean? That means, when you can't find workers, you turn to technology, you turn to automation. And it is happening. I know there are Members of this Chamber who think that by giving more money to people, this is a very smart thing to do and it is helping everybody. It is not helping because those jobs are not going to be there in the future. There was a story in the Washington Post today about Huntington Bancshares. It is a bank in Columbus, OH. They are fielding literally dozens of calls from business owners who are trying to get financing to buy more equipment that will offset their loss in workers; in other words, more automation, more technology that they would not have otherwise gone to, but because they can't find any workers, they are using their money they would have paid workers to go to more technology. Those jobs are gone. I know, again, some people, maybe on my side of the aisle, think that might be a good thing, a more efficient economy. I want people at work. I want companies to be hiring more people. A good friend of mine is a manufacturer. She has about 200 people. She makes a great product--windows--in Ohio, southwest Ohio, Hamilton, OH. She is looking for 60 people right now. Sixty people. She is offering a signing bonus of a thousand bucks and offering other benefits. People aren't showing up. But when the $300 ends and when the additional $10,000 of unemployment insurance not being taxed ends, people will go back to work. The first State to decide ``You know what, we are going to unilaterally just say we are not going to take the $300`` was the State of Montana. My colleague from Montana told me recently that he has a friend who is a hotel owner, and he was having a job fair every week trying to get people to come in to apply for jobs. He was getting about one applicant per week. The week after the Governor said no more $600 or no more $300 benefit on unemployment insurance in addition to the State benefit, 60 people showed up. That may be an extreme example, but I have to tell you, it is going to make a big difference. Let's help get this economy going again. We are turning the corner on COVID. We have a situation now where we can actually get started again, get the businesses reopened. I talked about the business owner in Columbus, OH, who was closed down. Do you know what his comment was? He said: I used the PPP program. That is the Paycheck Protection Program, which we all passed here. I got through COVID. We struggled, but we made it through COVID. We could make it through COVID, but now we can't make it because of our own government paying people more not to work on unemployment insurance than we can pay them to work. He feels like his own government has turned on him. That is not helping anybody. It is not helping the small businesses, it is certainly not helping the taxpayer, and it is not helping those individuals who are not getting back to work, back to their routines, back to the training, back to the 401(k) plan, back to their healthcare plan, and having the opportunity to achieve their American dream. I hope that we change our minds here and don't continue this until September 6 and decide, instead, let's get people back to work. I would also be for a $100-a-week signing bonus if people were to go back to work. I think that would be a good use of funding. Let's, say, do that for 6 weeks and at the same time stop the $300 Federal supplement. By doing that, those 8-million-plus jobs that are available right now would start to get filled, and we could really get our economy back on track. I yield back my time

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am here on the floor this afternoon to talk about the economy, how to get it on the right track and particularly how to deal with the jobs crisis we face right now. It is a different kind of crisis than we normally talk about. There are a lot of jobs open, and the workers who are needed are not coming forward. Washington needs to change direction to get the economy on the right track. Current law provides that at least until Labor Day--that is in September of this year--there will be a Federal supplemental payment of $300 per week added to the State unemployment benefit. So if somebody is on unemployment insurance, they will get their normal State benefit, which in Ohio is about half of whatever your income was, but on top of that, now there is a $300 Federal supplement. It was put in place during COVID-19, but it continues until at least September. By doing so, adding that $300, it nearly doubles the unemployment insurance benefit, on average. It also results in about 42 percent of those people who are on unemployment insurance making more on UI than they were making at work. It has the effect of, in most States, more than doubling the amount of unemployment insurance, and it also doubles the minimum wage. So you can imagine why this is a disincentive for some people to go back to work, if they can make more not working. On top of that, Democrats here in Congress, during the COVID legislation, added another benefit to people on unemployment insurance compared to people who are working, and that is to say that your first $10,000 of unemployment insurance is tax-free. So if you are a truckdriver making 35,000, 40,000 bucks a year, you don't get that tax benefit, but if you are on unemployment insurance, you do get that benefit--again, another disincentive to go back to work. People are logical. If the government is going to pay you more not to work than to work, it creates a problem. And you can see that problem. We have a record number of job openings right now; 8.1 million jobs are open in America today. The economic recovery we all are looking forward to is being hampered by what? A lack of workers. If you go down your Main Street wherever you live, you will see the ``help wanted'' signs up. If you go by your restaurants, you will see, instead of the marquees saying ``Come and check out our great apple pie or our hamburgers,'' they say ``We are paying signing bonuses''--$500, $250. I went by a Frisch's Big Boy on the way to the airport on Monday, and that is what I saw--McDonald's offering a $500 bonus. There are manufacturers I know in the State of Ohio I represent offering much more in terms of signing bonuses. I talked to a woman last week, who is a friend of mine, who runs a manufacturing company, a great little company, which has about 200, 250 employees. She is looking for 60 people right now. She is offering a $1,000 signing bonus plus other incentives, benefits, to be able to come to work, and she can't get people to show up to apply for work. So this is a real problem in terms of our interest in getting this economic recovery going. It is time to stop this extraordinary Federal unemployment supplement. By keeping in place this $300 per week on top of this UI benefit and not taxing that benefit, President Biden and my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are putting us in a tough position and, I think, on the verge of a real jobs crisis because some of these jobs will end up going away, some permanently, if we don't do something about it. I believe the Federal unemployment insurance was necessary, the Federal supplement, when we were at the heat of the COVID-19 crisis-- let's say a year ago now. People were losing their jobs through no fault of their own. Their businesses were shutting down, in part because the government was putting in place social distancing guidelines or otherwise saying that businesses had to temporarily close. A lot of people lost their jobs. In my view, Congress rightly put in place expanded unemployment benefits to help those families get by when the economy was largely shut down, but we are in an entirely different place now, entirely different place. Again, 8.1 million jobs are open right now. It is a historic time. We have never had this many jobs open in America. Thanks to the hard work of a lot of our researchers and scientists, this vaccine has gotten out there at record pace. We now have had vaccinations at levels that we had all hoped for earlier. As a result, with more than half of Americans already having had one vaccination--in my State of Ohio, it is even better than that--restrictions are easing, and businesses are opening up, fully open again. In my home State of Ohio, there is no longer a mask mandate. Here in the U.S. Senate is an example. Things are opening up. With that reopening, again, comes all these job openings that can't be filled. The economic recovery you would expect right now is not happening because people are not getting back to work. We just had the jobs numbers from last month. The country added 266,000 jobs in April. This was alarming because it was only one- quarter of what the economists predicted, only 25 percent of what people predicted. It is an early warning sign that should not be ignored. These disappointing monthly job reports typically tell bad news on two fronts. One is that there haven't been as many new jobs added as you would want, and that is certainly true. But second, it says there are not enough available jobs out there. There aren't enough open jobs out there. That is not the problem now. Adequate number of jobs is not the problem. The jobs are available. But if the President and Congress don't change course, that could become a problem. If steps aren't taken to dismantle some of the disincentives to work, some of these record number of available jobs we talked about are going to go away. Let me give an example. There is a restaurant called Geordie's in Columbus, OH. They have closed down. Geordie's is closed down. They can't find workers. That is the reason. The owner was quoted as saying something like: You know, COVID-19 didn't take me down. He got the PPP loan. He kept going, and he struggled through, and he was staying open. He said: My own government has taken me down, because he can't compete with unemployment insurance at that level. We have lots of other businesses in Ohio. Here are some. Your Pizza Shop, Muddy's, Donatos--all in Wooster, OH--have told me that they are closing down 1 day a week or more because they are understaffed. Facing no alternative, other businesses are figuring out ways to permanently move forward with fewer employees. This concerns me. In some cases, they tell me they are just downsizing their business. If you can't find those 60 employees and you are the manufacturer right now, what do you do? You are restricting your business. You are not opening new markets, and you are closing down maybe even some existing customers because you can't serve them. So these jobs are going. Others are figuring out ways to do it with fewer people. Again, some might say that is a good thing--using technology and using automation to displace workers. I don't think it is a good thing. I would rather have more people working. That is what they want, too, but they can't afford it, so they are going to more automation, they tell me, going to anything they can do to do it with fewer workers. This is a problem, and again, Washington is creating this problem. Why would we do that? Again, I understood it and supported it when we had the COVID-19 crisis. People were losing their jobs through no fault of their own. But the opposite is happening now. We have to change gears. We are at a crossroads. We can continue to have this economy stagnate, continue to hurt working families, or we can get people back to work and create robust and sustained economic growth. I would take the $300 a week, by the way, and shift it to a 6-week temporary bonus of $100 a week to go to work, a work bonus. You could do that immediately even while keeping the $300 in place for a short period of time because, right away, you could help people to get back to work. It would happen. By the way, some States have decided on their own just to get rid of the $300 because they know it is not working for the small businesses; it is not working for the economy; it is not working for individuals who are not getting back to their career track, who are losing training and losing the ability to keep up with what is going on at work because they are, again, given this disincentive to go back. It is working. There was a hotel, I am told, in the first State that decided to do this, which was Montana--did it about 2 weeks ago--a hotel where they were offering every week to hire more employees. They were looking for more employees. They were getting 1 person a week to show up; last week, 60 people--60 people--because they are not offering the $300 anymore. They are giving the money back. The Biden administration, as you know, would like to spend a lot more money on a lot of different things--that totals about $6 trillion when you add it all up--to prime the pump, more stimulus, get the country back to work, as they say. What has happened is, a lot of this stimulus money, particularly in the $1.9 trillion COVID package, has overheated the economy--and you can see it in the higher inflation numbers--which is what a lot of people predicted, including Democratic economists and former Secretary of Treasury Larry Summers. A lot of us on the Republican side were concerned about this. Well, it is happening. And we are seeing more and more proposals for more and more stimulus. Inflation is not what we need. By the way, that spending of $6 trillion is about six times what the government spent during the New Deal in the 1930s, and that is inflation-adjusted. I mean, this is a lot of money. Instead, what we ought to do is help get people back to work and encourage them and let this economy grow on its own, which it is going to do. During the COVID-19 discussion, the Congressional Budget Office--a nonpartisan group here in Washington and Congress--told us that the economy is going to recover to its pre-COVID level by midyear if we do nothing, no more stimulus. Yet people insisted on more and more stimulus, and we can see what is happening. Part of that stimulus, part of that spending, was this $300 until Labor Day, $300 week per week in expanded unemployment benefits from the Federal Government, on top of the fact that you don't get taxed on your first $10,000. Again, that $300 is on top of whatever the State benefit is. Are there other factors that are leading to this labor problem we have now in our country? I think there are. I think there are. One is that we have a situation now where some people just can't afford childcare. So they are not only getting more money on unemployment, perhaps, than they are getting at work; if they go to work, they have to pay for childcare. And childcare is too expensive, and I would like to work on that. One of the reasons, we are hearing, is that schools are not open, so they have to use childcare because their kids are not in school. With only 54 percent of K-8 schools actually being open today--that is the latest number we have--that is a real problem. Again, that is one we can solve. The CDC is playing a role in that by saying: Get the kids back to school. They can do so safely. There certainly should not be any reason for this now, given the fact that so many people have been vaccinated and, thank goodness, the infection levels are going down so much. So I know that is an issue. Childcare is an issue. The other issue, I think, that we have to know is that some people are concerned about still getting infected at work and what the virus might, you know, lead to in terms of an unsafe workplace. But I will tell you, that concern is a lot less now. Again, so many people have been vaccinated, and the CDC again has responded to that and said: You can have a safe workplace. You can have a safe school. It is not hard to do. So let's get back to work, and particularly, let's deal with this unemployment insurance issue because that is the main reason people are not returning to work, I am told by the employers out there With more than 40 percent of workers making more with unemployment insurance and that supplement than they would in their jobs, businesses just can't compete. Think how tragic this is. A small business owner works tirelessly to keep the lights on through COVID-19--again, maybe uses the PPP or otherwise and stays in business--and finally, after more than a year, reaches a point where the virus is in retreat--we are doing all the things we should be doing to make our workplaces safe--and now they might have to close because they just can't find people to work. The same story is being told all over the country and certainly all over my State. Again, this is why 21 States now, as of this afternoon, including my home State of Ohio, have decided to give the $300 back. But we shouldn't, here in Washington, continue to provide that $300 to everybody else. Governors in these States understand that encouraging workers to return to the job market is essential to the economy, but it is also good for the workforce to get back to work, get back to what happens when you go to work, which is you have that sense of fulfillment, that dignity and self-respect that come with work, and you are keeping up with whatever the technological changes at work are and getting back on your career track. Guidance from the Biden administration, the CDC, says we can move forward with getting back to normal. It is time for President Biden to follow that advice and to end the disincentive to work that is holding back the economic recovery. These are simple steps we can take. Again, I would do a $100 bonus to go back to work for 6 weeks. But the most important thing is to end the $300 and to let people once again have the opportunity to pursue their American dream, which is not unemployment; it is getting a job. With 8.1 million jobs being offered--a historic number, the most ever--it is time to make that change. I urge my colleagues and I urge the administration to change course. I yield back my time.

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

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am here on the floor to talk about the economy, what is going on, on the jobs front, and where we go from here. Last week, the Department of Labor issued its most recent jobs report. It showed that we added 266,000 jobs in April. That was about one quarter of what was predicted. It was disappointing. It shows that the job growth coming out of the pandemic has now slowed. There is a question as to why, since there are so many jobs out there. How is it that there can be so many jobs available, and yet we have such a disappointing April jobs report? The demand for workers is certainly high. The other thing going on out there is that we have creeping inflation. We learned this past week that the Consumer Price Index rose 4.2 percent between April 2020 and April 2021. So the year, April to April, is the highest 12-month increase going back to the summer of 2008. There is this whole debate going on about whether there is inflation or not. Well, I would ask you to talk to your constituents because they will tell you there is inflation. There is inflation at the gas pump; there is inflation at the grocery store; there is inflation if you are trying to build something. There is inflation throughout the economy right now, and that should concern every American. It is because of policy choices, but it doesn't have to be this way. What this argument boils down to with regard to jobs and with regard to inflation are really two very different approaches and philosophies of government and how to create jobs, how to increase wages, and how to help working families. The Biden administration believes the government needs to spend more to prime the pump. This is despite our being told by every economic analysis, including our own nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, that without any new stimulus at the beginning of this year, we were going to see the economy come back strongly. In fact, all of the studies showed that the rate of growth this year was going to be 4 percent or more without any stimulus, without any new spending, and that, by midyear, according to the Congressional Budget Office, we would be back to the prepandemic economy and economic growth. Yet the Biden administration is insisting on priming the pump, putting more money out there. The $1.9 trillion spending package was all about that. Some of us raised concerns about it and warned people about this. By the way, one of us who did this was Larry Summers, who was the Secretary of the Treasury under a Democratic administration and who is a prominent economist on the other side of the aisle. He said this--and he was right--that this risked overheating an economy that was already growing and would result in inflation. Unfortunately, the massive stimulus seems to have exactly done that. Unfortunately, now there is another wave of spending that is being projected. Over $4 trillion is being proposed in new spending in addition to the $1.9 trillion, two new packages the President talked about in his address to Congress last month. It is interesting because, even though inflation is going up and even though the jobs market is disappointing, it seems like the administration isn't changing course. One thing the administration is not changing course on is that it wants to continue to pay people a substantial amount not to work. Now, in my view, during the COVID-19 crisis--at the heat of it--we needed to do something to help people who had lost their jobs through no fault of their own, and the States' unemployment systems were the places to do that. So we added a Federal supplement on top of the State unemployment benefit. In Ohio, the State pays about $360 a week, on average, which is about half of whatever your salary was or your income was, and we added $300 on top of that. Think about that. Instead of $360, it is $660 per week, on average. That means that, for 42 percent of the people who are on unemployment insurance--this is a national figure--they are making more on unemployment than they were at work. So a lot of people have made the logical decision and say: Why should I be going back to work? Unfortunately, when the President has been asked about this, he has said: I know there's been a lot of discussion . . . that people are being paid to stay home rather than going to work. Well, we don't see much evidence of that. With all due respect, I hope the President will talk to some of the business owners who I am talking to, particularly small businesses. The numbers tell a different story. According to the most recent Labor Department data released just this week, at the end of March, we had 8.1 million job openings in America. That was 8.1 million jobs open. We all know that because we are back in our States, as we will be later today or tomorrow, and we will see the ``help wanted'' signs. By the way, that is the highest number in history. We have never had 8 million jobs open in America. Based on this Labor Department study, the job increases were broadly distributed, 185,000 new job openings in restaurants and hospitality-- as they are getting going, many of these restaurants are saying: This is great. We have the people coming back, but we can't find workers. There are 155,000 in State and local education and 81,000 in entertainment. With that demand for workers and the coronavirus pandemic substantially improving, the employment numbers should be skyrocketing. We should be seeing so many people going back to work. This is an opportunity for people to go back, to get into their careers, and get back to the dignity and self-respect that comes from work and the fulfillment that comes from work, but it is not happening. If you ask business owners in my home State of Ohio and across the country, they will all tell you the same story: Business is booming, but we can't find workers. One Ohio restaurant manager said in an interview, ``It's crazy. Honestly, we are busier than we were before COVID,'' but they can't find staff to keep up with the demand. The Dayton, OH, area chamber of commerce did a study very recently, and 78 percent of its members said they can't find the workers they need to fill the job openings they have--78 percent. So why is this happening? I think there are a few reasons. One is that it is true that we still have a skills gap in our country, and that is something I have been working on, along with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle. It is the reason I authored what is called the JOBS Act. It was to make sure that we have this connection--not have a skills gap but, instead, have the right skills being taught to match the work needs that we have. Honestly, with regard to those numbers that I just talked about with regard to entertainment jobs and restaurant jobs and State and local education jobs, most of those jobs do not require a specialized skill. So the skills gap needs to be addressed, particularly in manufacturing, where I was told today, by the National Association of Manufacturers, that there are 700,000 manufacturing jobs open right now. Again, many of the jobs that are open do not require advanced skills. They just require you to show up and to be willing to do the work. It is also understandable to me that some people may be hesitant to go back to work because of COVID, but we now have these three effective vaccines that are doing the hard work to try to get us back to a more normal lifestyle, where we can get back to school and back to church and back to synagogue and back to work. Our Nation's researchers and scientists have helped us to get to this point, and as we saw from the CDC recommendation today regarding masks, we are turning the corner. I also realize, for some people, childcare is an issue--there is no question about that--the cost of childcare. If you look at the numbers in terms of people going back to work, it is true that it is disproportionately women. I agree that this is an issue, but I will tell you that one of the issues we hear about, as you dig deeper into this, is that it is because, in many places, the kids are not back to school. So that is a solvable problem. It is time for our children to go back to school again. Follow the CDC. Follow the science. There were 54 percent of K-8 public schools that were offering full-time classroom teaching in March. The rest were not. I have to tell you that none of these are the main causes of the current problem from everything I am hearing. There are jobs, and there are folks qualified to do them. They just aren't looking for work, and it is because of the way the government has chosen to pay people not to work. Wages are up, by the way. So, for those who say, ``Well, employers need to raise wages,'' they are up. By the way, that is one reason we have inflation. It is because wages are going up. Wages going up, I think, is not a bad thing even though it will count for some of this inflation that we have, but the wages going up is not going to make the difference here. Even though wages have gone up on an average of 4, 5 percent, people are still not coming to work the way you would expect. Jimmy John's is offering hiring bonuses. The McDonald's locally, where I live in Cincinnati, is offering a $500 signing bonus. Chipotle is offering free college tuition after 4 months on the job. One wholesale distributor in Ohio is offering a $9,000 sign-on bonus for certified truck drivers. By the way, with regard to truck drivers, you know about the Colonial Pipeline and cutting off the gas supply to the east coast of the United States and people who are concerned about going to the gas station and getting gas in many gas stations and not having any fuel available, including in States all over the East and the Southeast. The answer that some people came up with--and it makes sense--is to have trucks actually deliver that fuel to those gas stations. The trucks could go to the places where the fuel is and where the pipeline would normally take it and move that fuel to the gas stations. The problem? No truck drivers. They literally cannot find truck drivers to move this fuel from the depots to the gas stations. This is a real problem. I have a constituent back home who contacted me yesterday. She is offering a $1,000 signing bonus, and she can get nobody to step forward. She has 60 jobs in Ohio, and she has 30 jobs in New York--a small business with only about 250 jobs total. She can't find anybody. When she talks to her people, they tell her: Well, as soon as the UI ends, I will be back. As soon as the unemployment insurance ends--the Federal supplement, the $300 supplement--I will be back. Businesses simply can't compete in an environment where more than 40 percent of the workers are making more on the unemployment supplement than they would be at their jobs. It is a problem, by the way, that States themselves are now starting to deal with because they realize this is a huge problem for their economies, for their small businesses, and for their workforces. As of this afternoon, just in the last week, 15 States have said: Do you know what? I am not going to accept the $300 supplement because I want to get people back to work. It is already making a difference. Someone just told me from the State of Montana--one of our colleagues from there--and Montana was the first State to do this--that, about a week ago, a hotel owner told him that he was in desperate need of people, and when he would put the ``help wanted'' sign out and ask people to come, he could get one person to show up per week. This week, 60 people showed up. Why? Because the unemployment insurance is running out, and people are now looking for work. So these States I think are going to continue to do this. I think it will be more than 15 by the time we are finished speaking here this afternoon. It is because the States realize, well, this is a competitive advantage. If New York doesn't do it and Ohio does--and by the way, Ohio is one of the States that just made the decision to do it this afternoon. If New York doesn't do it, that businessperson I talked about is going to do more manufacturing in Ohio because that is where she has the workforce. That will help Ohio relative to States that wouldn't choose to move on beyond the $300 supplement. Unemployment insurance is important, and it is still going to be there, but it will be the State benefit that it has always been. The other thing is the work requirement. In unemployment insurance, again, in Ohio, it is about 50 percent of whatever your wages are. And then there is a requirement that you look for work, and if you get an offer, you can't stay on unemployment insurance. That has always been the tradition. Under COVID, States accepted waivers not to have to require people to look for work. About 30 States now just in the last few weeks have decided to get rid of that waiver, including Ohio. Why? Because again, it is not helping anybody. It is not helping the workers; it is not helping the small businesses, certainly; and it is really not helping the taxpayers who are paying tens of billions of dollars for these supplements. I will say, when I debated this on the Senate floor, when we had an amendment that actually passed during the COVID-19 legislation--later, that amendment was amended, but we tried to end the unemployment insurance sooner given the economic numbers that were out there. One of the Democratic colleagues on the other side said that--do I think the Ohio workers somehow don't have a work ethic, that they are lazy? That is not what I think at all. I don't think they are lazy at all. I think they are logical. Common sense dictates that when you are offering to pay somebody more not to work than to work, you are likely to get a bad result. Again, it was needed when people were losing their jobs through no fault of their own. COVID-19 devastated--ravaged--so many sectors of our economy. A lot of those sectors are coming back and are coming back strong, but they need workers, and they need them desperately. The stakes couldn't be higher. Let me illustrate why. If workers don't go back to work, some businesses will actually close, and these jobs will go away permanently. That, to me, is a reality. Take Geordie's Restaurant in Columbus, OH. Geordie's shut down a couple of weeks ago because they couldn't find enough job applicants to keep the lights on, period. They shut down. This is a restaurant that made it through the worst of the pandemic, when our restaurant and hospitality industry was in really tough shape. But as owner Geordie Hull-Jones said himself, ``We fought hard to get through COVID, but COVID didn't kill us, the stimulus did.'' ``[B]ut COVID didn't kill us, the stimulus did.'' That is a quote from a business owner. That is the difference, again, between the philosophy that the Biden administration seems to be taking and, frankly, the reality and the philosophy that we are encouraging, which is let's get people back to work; let's get this economy moving again. The President is committed to spending an unprecedented amount of tax dollars to try and get what it takes to get the economy back on track. But spending more tax dollars isn't a prescription for what ails our economy today. Getting people back to work certainly is. If we don't, again, businesses will close; careers cannot be continued. People won't get the fulfillment that they get from going to work, and many of these jobs will not return. Instead of following this path, let's change course. Let's follow common sense and get our country back to work so we can all enjoy the goods and services we work to provide for each other. Let's help our Nation's small businesses, which are the lifeblood of so many in our economy. Let's help people currently on unemployment get started building lasting careers that they enjoy, make a living, find long-term stability, so they can realize their American dream. That is what this country is all about. So, today, I am urging the Biden administration to take two simple steps to encourage people to move past the pandemic and to get back to work. First, we need to reimplement the Federal requirement that people must be actively searching for work if they are going to receive unemployment. Again, Ohio has made that decision, as have about 30 other States, but let's make this the national standard that it was prior to the pandemic. Long-term unemployment doesn't benefit anyone, and it will ensure that people are able to get off unemployment insurance more quickly. Second, we need to draw down the Federal unemployment supplement funded by COVID-19 that passed in March. It is time to look at ending this not on September 6, as it is currently slated to end, but now, while the economy is strong and growing and we are trying to get people back to work. As I said, it is a rational economic decision for many people right now who collect an unemployment check that effectively pays upward of $15 an hour to stay at home and not work, but it makes no sense to keep the supplement in place as we are reopening, and the focus is on shifting toward getting the economy back up and running. My own preference is that some of this might be used to pay people a bonus to go back to work. I know that is controversial on my side of the aisle, but, I tell you, I think it works. Montana is doing it, and it is working for them. How about 100 bucks a week? Instead of the $300 supplement, 100 bucks a week for 6 weeks as a return-to-work bonus? To me, that makes a lot of sense. That would be something I think we could get some bipartisan support for around here, and that would help the workers, the small businesses, and our economy. Through these two steps, we can create the disincentive to work that was a byproduct of our response to an unprecedented pandemic--we can stop that disincentive to work. Now that we are beating COVID-19, we should focus on getting back to normal. I urge the Biden administration to focus on getting the economy back up and running and getting folks off the sidelines and back to work I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, first, I would like to congratulate my colleague from Wyoming for his thoughtful remarks. I mean, he is absolutely right. This is not the time for us to be raising taxes. It is tax day coming up next week, and Senator Ernst of Iowa put together this colloquy to focus us all on that issue and the fact that here we are coming onto tax day, yet there are proposals out there saying you are not paying enough tax. So all of you who think you are paying too much tax, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle and the administration would like to increase those taxes substantially. It is going to really hurt our economy and hurt workers. That is my big concern about this proposal in this so-called infrastructure package. Our economy is kind of limping along still, in part, because we have spent so much in stimulus that it has overheated the economy, and you can see the inflation that is hitting us. You can see it in the gas prices when you go to the pump or food costs or, if you are trying to buy lumber these days, check out the cost. On the one hand, Democrats are encouraging more inflation through stimulation that really wasn't needed based on what we had learned from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office--and that has overheated the economy--and, by the way, as former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers predicted. This was in a Democratic administration, two of them. I am concerned about the spending, but then to pay for the spending, these tax cuts are really a mistake. What I would like to do is go back to the economy we had before COVID. That economy was really helping everyone. It was an inclusive economy. Two years ago, just before COVID, we had significant economic growth, which most people know about. What folks might not know about February a year ago, just before COVID hit, it was the 19th straight month of wage growth of 3 percent or more on an annual basis. Think about that, 3 percent or more wage growth. We haven't had that in Ohio, my home State, in a long time, perhaps a decade and a half. That kind of wage growth was primarily focused on lower income and middle-income workers, so the benefit wasn't just to the companies and the people at the high end. The benefit was primarily to those who were at the lower end of the economic scale. We had a study by the Congressional Budget Office, as we looked to these corporate tax cuts that were made in 2017, and they said that 70 percent of the benefit was going to go to workers in terms of higher wages and better benefits. That is exactly what happened. I think they were right. We tied the 50-year low in unemployment at 3.5 percent. We also had historically low unemployment for some groups--Hispanics, Blacks, Asian Americans. In fact, before the pandemic, we reached the lowest poverty rate we ever had in this country. We started keeping track of it back in the 1950s, the late fifties. We had the lowest poverty rate going into the pandemic than we had ever had. You probably haven't heard that much because it wasn't reported much. Again, it was not just a growth economy; it was an inclusive economy. Importantly, the tax reform that was put in place in 2017 didn't just help stimulate this kind of inclusive growth but also stopped these companies in America from going overseas. I remember this word ``inversion.'' The companies were literally inverting, meaning they were switching and becoming foreign companies to get out from under our Tax Code. We have two big companies in Ohio that did this. Probably some companies in your State did too. We were losing jobs and losing investments because they went overseas and took the investments with them. This was not a good situation for American workers. In addition, there was a lockout effect while companies were saying: I am not going to bring my cash home because it costs me too much. I will keep it overseas and invest it over there. So $1.6 trillion from overseas earnings came back to our company after the 2017 tax reforms because we changed the way we taxed internationally, and companies no longer had this incentive to keep their money overseas--$1.6 trillion. As a result of the 2017 changes, the largest U.S. companies increased their domestic research and development spending by 25 percent to $707 billion. They increased their capital expenditures by 20 percent to $1.4 trillion. Before the pandemic, we had a good economy, but, importantly to me, it was an opportunity economy, creating jobs and increasing wages right here at home. All that progress could be thrown away through the tax increases that are being proposed. The centerpiece of the Biden plan is corporate tax increases that would raise the combined Federal and State corporate rate from an average of 25.8 percent. That is the 21-percent Federal rate plus the average of the State income tax for corporations. Twenty-one percent, by the way, is above the average of the OECD, the developed countries in the world. When we put it in place back in 2017, we did it at 21 percent, specifically, to get right at the average so we wouldn't be noncompetitive. We would be able to compete and win. Since then, other countries have come below us, so we are actually above the average now. Yet the Biden administration would like to take this rate from 21 up to 28, but when you add the State and local, you know, the State taxes, it is to 32.8 percent. Again, it would put America, of course, as having the highest corporate tax rate in the entire world. It gives us a much higher tax rate than many of our competitors like China. Why would we want to do that? Based on analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation, these combined corporate tax hikes are actually five times as big as the corresponding tax cuts were in 2017. Let me repeat that because it is fascinating. Democrats are proposing, they say, to get rid of the 2017 tax cuts, but that is not what they are doing. They are actually proposing going back and adding five times more tax increases than were cut The Joint Committee on Taxation--again, a nonpartisan group--says the tax cuts were about $300 billion over 10 years, and the proposed tax increases are about $1.5 trillion. That just makes no sense for our workers. Again, CBO has said 70 percent of the benefit went to workers. Who is going to get hurt by doing this? The workers. The Biden plan also eliminates what is called the FDII, or the foreign-derived intangible income provision. That is the one that incentivized U.S. companies to bring their intellectual property back here. We wanted that. We did it on purpose. The companies that did that brought all their IP back here, including Google, Cisco, Qualcomm, Synopsys, and Facebook--some pretty big companies and a lot of others. We wanted them to bring that valuable IP back here, and they did because it creates high-paying, high-skilled jobs here at home. Why would we want to stop that? That was the carrot to bring it back. It also makes it more costly for U.S. companies to operate outside the United States, again, punishing American workers who have jobs here that support international sales. Studies by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office have shown, again, it is workers who will bear the brunt of that. This is what many seem to miss. When we talk about how this proposal makes us less competitive, we are really saying that it makes American workers less competitive. It ties their hands behind their backs. In Ohio--this is one example--we have Procter and Gamble. Procter and Gamble makes a lot of diapers and a lot of other products. It is not cost-effective for them to make diapers here and ship them overseas so they have diaper plants overseas. That is the only way they can be competitive. These tax increases would punish companies like that if they are to do business overseas, even though they are creating jobs here in America by doing that. There are about 13,000 people who work for Procter and Gamble in Southwest Ohio, where I live. Forty percent of them have their jobs because of international sales. You are talking about losing thousands of jobs in America if they can't be competitive globally. We want our American companies to be competitive globally, at least we should. These tax hikes are going to hurt our competitiveness and put domestic jobs at risk. By the way, the Biden administration knows all this is going to happen. They know that increasing the corporate rate is going to make us noncompetitive. Taxing international overseas earnings, taxing companies more that want to bring their IP back will make us less competitive. We know this because when Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen announced these proposals, she said: Help us, other countries in the world. Raise your taxes, too, to make it a ``more level playing field.'' It is a plea by America to other countries, saying: Please raise your taxes, too, so we can all be in this together. Other countries aren't going to do that. Again, they actually lowered their taxes since 2017, on average. By the way, it is interesting. The Irish Finance Minister said right after that, when he was asked at a press conference ``Are you going to raise your taxes?'' he said ``No, we want to be competitive. We want to bring jobs.'' Of course, they want to bring jobs to their countries. Other countries are looking at us and saying: Wow. America is just going to show the white flag and allow us to now beat them in terms of this global competition that is out there. That is the real world. It may sound good to raise taxes on business, but it is going to hurt workers, and it is going to make us noncompetitive. I really hope the Biden administration is not successful in this effort. I don't want to see the workers hurt whom I represent in Ohio. I want to see us get back to that economy wherein we had not just low employment but rising wages and low poverty rates--the kind of inclusive economy we should all want. There are all sorts of other issues here, and I know my colleague from Iowa is probably going to talk about some of those, like the estate tax and the capital gains tax. I mean, there are all sorts of things that are being talked about. Yet, in this first package of infrastructure, just the corporate taxes alone are going to be so damaging to our economy. Instead of pursuing these kinds of partisan tax hikes, let's focus on getting back to where we were pre-COVID--back to that strong job and wage growth and back to that competitive opportunity economy. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, this is National Police Week. It is a time every year when we stop to pay tribute to our law enforcement officers around the country, the men and women in blue who serve us every day in my State of Ohio and every State represented in this Chamber. We also remember the brave law enforcement officers who tragically died in the line of duty. We can never forget this is a dangerous profession. The National Law Enforcement Memorial and Museum reported that 2020 was the deadliest year for law enforcement in decades. In Ohio alone, we sadly lost six brave law enforcement officers over the past year. Here in the Capitol, of course, we lost three officers over the past year, including on January 6. In the course of our Nation's history, more than 24,000 officers have died in the line of duty. I was proud to join colleagues in March in sponsoring legislation called the Protect and Serve Act, which would create Federal penalties on those who would attempt to harm or kill a police officer. I believe Protect and Serve would send a strong message to help deter these crimes. Ultimately, I think it would make our men and women in blue safer and help save lives. This week, I urge my colleagues to join me in standing with the families of our fallen police officers and thanking them and thanking law enforcement for what they do every day to protect us. One way to express our gratitude is passing laws that will assist them in their critical work to keep us safe. Opioid Epidemic With that in mind, I am also on the floor today to call on my colleagues to support our law enforcement by taking decisive action to help them to keep some of the deadliest drugs in the world from coming into our communities. It is not an overstatement to say that this is a matter of life or death. Overdose deaths in the United States have sadly reached a record high during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control, 87,000 Americans died during the 12-month period between September 2019 and September 2020, the most recent data we have. This can be directly attributed to the circumstances surrounding the pandemic. So many families are feeling the pain of these losses. Sadly, based on the current trends, we expect calendar year 2020 in full to be even worse. What is the main driver of these overdoses and overdose deaths? Synthetic opioids, most notably fentanyl. Fentanyl is 50 times more powerful than heroin, relatively inexpensive, deadly, and incredibly addictive. For years, this has been coming to our shores from China, first predominantly through our mail system, and with our new legislation in place to prevent that from happening, much of it is now coming in through Mexico. In 2019, there were 70,630 deaths from opioids and other drugs, and more than half of those--36,359--involved fentanyl, sometimes mixed with other drugs like cocaine and crystal meth or heroin. Again, of all the poisons, fentanyl is the most deadly. It does have a medical purpose and can be used to treat patients in severe pain the same way morphine is used. Both fentanyl and morphine are classified under schedule II by the drug enforcement authorities. In order to avoid prosecution under that scheduling order, drug traffickers started making slight modifications to fentanyl, creating what we call fentanyl analogs or fentanyl-related substances, essentially copycat fentanyl. Evil scientists in places like China, Mexico, and India, working in unregulated pharmaceutical plants, will make a slight modification to fentanyl, sometimes adjusting a single molecule, to create what are, essentially, these fentanyl copycats. While these copycats may have the same narcotic properties as fentanyl, these tiny variations allow these traffickers to evade prosecution. Oftentimes, by the way, these fentanyl-related substitutes, these copycats, are even more powerful than fentanyl itself. Take, for example, carfentanil. These fentanyl-related substances are the reason I am on the floor today. In 2018--2018--in recognition of the growing threat these copycats posed to our public health, the DEA temporarily scheduled fentanyl-related substances as schedule I, the highest designation they can give. Since then, we have passed two temporary extensions of that designation. Most recently, Congress passed a 5-month extension just ahead of the previous deadline of May 6, just a couple weeks ago, and President Biden signed that legislation into law last week. I supported that temporary extension because the alternative was worse. The only alternative was to let these substances become legal. But I don't think kicking the can down the road for another 5 months is nearly enough to safeguard against the threat of copycat fentanyl. We need to do much more between now and when this temporary scheduling extension expires in October. Law enforcement needs certainty, and the drug cartels and those evil scientists need to know we are serious in addressing this problem, that there will be consequences. We need a permanent solution. Specifically, let's pass bipartisan legislation I introduced with my colleague Senator Manchin called FIGHT Fentanyl, which simply says: Let's not allow these illicitly manufactured and deadly synthetic opioids to suddenly become legal again. That is what law enforcement wants. That is what our communities demand. That is what we deserve to give them. It is long overdue that we make this designation permanent. I know some of my colleagues oppose permanent scheduling of these fentanyl drugs because they are concerned about mandatory minimum sentences, and also that it could hinder research into future medications to treat addiction. Let me address both of those quickly. First, there is this concern about the harsh punishments that don't fit the nature of the crime. I share that concern. That is why our legislation ensures that mandatory minimum sentences are not automatically imposed in any criminal case. We want the judge to look at the severity of the crime and consider all relevant factors in sentencing. So that issue has been addressed in our bipartisan legislation. There has been a great deal of conversation about the impact of prosecutions and incarcerations on specific populations, including minority communities. What is often lost in this debate, I will say, is the growing impact of fatal overdoses in those same communities. Since 2016, while White fatalities have decreased through the period of 2019, the data we have shows that overdoses from opioids among Black Americans, particularly Black men, have actually gotten worse, not better. From 2011 to 2016, that same time period, when White overdoses and deaths were reduced, Black Americans had the highest increase in synthetic opioid-involved overdose deaths, compared to all populations. And while in 2017 to 2018 overall opioid-involved overdose fatalities decreased by just over 4 percent, rates among Black and Hispanic Americans actually increased. This is an issue we must address here. Another issue my colleagues have raised, again, is concern that permanently scheduling fentanyl and its analogues somehow hinders research into treating addiction. First of all, I agree we need this research. We need it badly. One example of this is coming up with naloxone, a miracle drug based on heroin that actually reverses the effects of an overdose. I spoke to the scientist, Roger Crystal, just last week, who developed the nasal version of this naloxone. It is a miracle. I have seen it work, and it saves lives. Researchers have told me there are barriers to being approved to legally research schedule I substances. There is also a stigma to conducting this kind of research, even though we know that it could lead to the development of new treatments. But this is something we can easily address by allowing qualified researchers the ability to study fentanyl analogues under schedule II as opposed to schedule I. So we can address that issue. I am open to working with my colleagues to address these barriers, and I believe that we can do that through the legislation creating flexibility in the registration system for scientists. But I would urge my colleagues that we need to use the next 5 months to do the hard work of finding a permanent solution to this crisis before we have to once again run the risk of letting these drugs become legal and the message that that sends and the deaths that would occur as a result. The U.S. Senate can take the lead and permanently classify these dangerous narcotics that are literally killing tens of thousands of our fellow citizens every year. Instead of kicking the can down the road again for 5 months from now, let's make it permanent. The House and the Biden administration should support this effort. Lives are at stake. It is important that we continue to focus this body, as we have, on the demand side of this equation--prevention, treatment, longer term recovery for fentanyl and for other substances. But it is also important that we not allow these substances to come on the streets at lower and lower costs and at greater and greater volumes. That is what would happen if we do not move as a Congress to ensure that these fentanyl copycats and fentanyl itself remain illicit drugs, as they are. Let's do the right thing for our community. Let's do the right thing for law enforcement. Let's be sure they have the predictability and certainty in law enforcement to know that these criminals can be prosecuted, these traffickers. We need to act now to address the threat of these deadly fentanyl drugs coming into our communities. I urge the Senate to pass the FIGHT Fentanyl bill. Join us in this effort so we can better work to reverse the tragic rise in overdose deaths around the United States of America. I yield the floor S.J. Res. 15

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to recognize my friend, Father Michael J. Graham, on his retirement as the 34th president of Xavier University in my hometown of Cincinnati, OH, and to thank him for his more than 34 years of service at Xavier helping to cultivate young leaders and developing Musketeer students with the Jesuit values of becoming ``men and women for others.'' Father Graham started at Xavier in 1984 as an assistant history professor. After pursuing his master of divinity from the Weston School of Theology, he returned to Xavier in 1989. He was appointed vice president for university relations in 1994 and was inaugurated president of Xavier University on September 8, 2001. Father Graham is the longest serving president in Xavier University's history, and over the past 20 years, he has had an incredible impact on the university, the Cincinnati community, and the more than 30,000 students who have graduated from Xavier University during his tenure. He has helped raise over $500 million to fund scholarships, advance the academic experience, support community projects, and advance the development of the university. In the community, Father Graham's passion to connect and collaborate with local and regional communities inspired him to establish the Community Building Institute as well as the Eigel Center for Community Engagement at Xavier. In 2017, Father Graham was asked to chair the Cincinnati Preschool Promise Board of Directors, a voter-approved initiative to ensure that quality preschool is available and affordable to all children living within the Cincinnati school district. It is one of many ways he has extended his and Xavier's reach into critical issues that impact the Cincinnati community. Since Father Graham began his presidency, U.S. News & World Report has consistently listed Xavier among the Nation's top 10 Midwest universities. Under his leadership, the university has expanded to offer master's programs in coaching education and athlete development, health economic and clinical outcomes research, customer analytics, and others. The impact of President Graham's academic and community-based vision for Xavier is far reaching. Father Mike will be missed, but his legacy will be felt for generations to come.