Rob Portman

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Thank you. I am committed to advancing our committee's competitiveness legislation in the manner laid out by my colleague from Michigan. I appreciate the work we have put into this package to date. As we prepare to dramatically increase investment in our research institutions and emerging technologies, the Safeguarding American Innovation Act must be a part of any competitiveness legislation. We must protect the intellectual property behind the revolutionary discoveries and advances being made across our Nation. This whole-of- government approach to get the Federal Government's house in order addresses a far-ranging problem and implicates the jurisdiction of other committees including the HELP Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee. I appreciate that the chairs and ranking members of those committees want to continue negotiations on this bill. I understand some changes to this legislation will be needed before it passes the Senate floor. That said, this legislation is the result of several years of bipartisan investigatory work by Senator Carper and myself during our time as chair and ranking member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. I am committed to working with committees of jurisdiction, the majority leader, Chairman Peters, and the administration to reach an agreement on this text in the coming weeks before it will be added to the Endless Frontier Act. I am also committed to continuing to engage with key stakeholders including our institutions of higher education. I am ready to put in the work and find a path forward here. The threat is real, and we need to address it now. I look forward to working with my colleague from Michigan to pass this legislation, along with other important measures before our committee, as soon as possible. While I am a cosponsor of Endless Frontier Act and believe it provides an important increase in funding to the National Science Foundation, if we don't take the basic steps outlined in the Safeguarding American Innovation Act, these funds may contribute to China's rise instead of improving the competitiveness of the United States, as intended.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I would like to start by thanking my colleague from Wyoming and my colleague from Iowa for their comments about where we are as a country 100 days into the Biden administration. It has been discouraging that we haven't seen more bipartisan work and with regard to the border, having been down there a couple of weeks ago, particularly discouraging that we can't come up with a bipartisan solution that deals with the obvious crisis on the border. Of course it is a crisis. Everybody knows that, including the Biden administration. The question is, What are we going to do about it? Some of us have laid out some proposals that we think would be very sensible, that could be done on a bipartisan basis. Yet we are not getting the kind of cooperation from the White House or the other side of the aisle, frankly, with regard to dealing with a clear crisis. In my time here in Congress, I have tried to work to bring Republicans and Democrats together on issues. I think that is the best thing for our country. I think you get, actually, better legislation if you have input from both sides, and I think you also have more sustainable legislation. If you don't work in a bipartisan way, what happens when there is a 50-50 Senate, as there is now, and where the Vice President can supply the tie-breaking vote, and if you do things on the basis of reconciliation or getting rid of the filibuster, which is what the Democratic majority currently would like to do, you end up lurching back and forth, don't you? So you pass Democratic legislation and then, when Republicans take over, Republican legislation. We should be focusing on American legislation. In my office, we have had some success with this bipartisan approach. Sixty-eight of my bills were signed into law by President Obama, and 82 of my bills were signed into law by President Trump--on important issues like the eviction crisis, job creation, and natural resource protection. So it can be done, and President Biden knows that. He served here in the Senate. In fact, he took pride in coming together with Republicans and Democrats to actually have agreements on some of these tough issues. Although I didn't vote for him because I thought that President Trump had better policy ideas, coming into this new administration, I was hopeful that President Biden would govern as he had campaigned. He promised, you remember, in his campaign to reach out to Republicans and Democrats alike. He talked about the need for unity. In fact, he gave that same speech in the primary and in the general election, which I thought took some courage, frankly, to do so in the primary because most of his opponents did not take that position. Yet, now having gotten elected, he seems to have forgotten the pledges that he made. I listened to his inaugural address intently, as I hope a lot of Americans did--and certainly my colleagues did--and he talked again about reaching out, going back to the days when we could work together, and he focused on unity. I was very hopeful with the tone he set that day, and I said so at the time. Yet that rhetoric has not been matched by action. It hasn't been matched by action when it comes to key policy initiatives they have already put forward, including the latest COVID- 19 spending bill that passed in March. Remember, despite a 50-50 Senate and very tight majority in the House of Representatives, there was no outreach to Republicans for the COVID- 19 legislation. Not a single Republican was consulted before unveiling the plan, and once it was out there, Democrats chose to work only among themselves and do it under what is called reconciliation, where they don't need a single Republican vote--this despite some of us having an alternative, which we actually presented to the White House. The next day, we were told: Thank you, but we are going to take the reconciliation approach, and we don't need any Republican input. That is too bad because the COVID-19 issue, obviously, is one where there has been not just bipartisanship but nonpartisanship. Five times last year, we passed major COVID-19 legislative initiatives with huge majorities. In one case, the biggest bill, the CARES package, passed with a 97-to-0 vote here. So this is one where we had always been able to work together. Unfortunately, the Biden administration chose the partisan path. Right now, the Biden administration is repeating this same mistake, as far as I can tell, because they have introduced their $2.3 trillion infrastructure package without consulting, again, any Republicans. We now hear that the White House and some Democratic leaders may want to pass this latest partisan proposal by reconciliation as well. I hope that is not true because, again, this is an area--infrastructure--where we have been able to work together on a bipartisan basis and get things done. In fact, typically that is how it happens with infrastructure Last Congress, we passed a bill out of committee on highways and bridges with a unanimous vote--not just a majority vote, a unanimous vote--by Republicans and Democrats. But the proposal they put forward, first, is not really about infrastructure because it dramatically expands the definition of ``infrastructure'' so that it is not at all what traditionally you would think or I would think of as the kind of hard assets--roads, bridges, ports, airports, transit, even broadband. Even the most generous description of ``infrastructure'' applied to this bill means that less than 20 percent of it, 20 percent of $2.3 trillion, is about infrastructure. It is about other things. And we can have a debate on those other things, whether it is nursing home subsidies or whether it is subsidies to electric car companies or whether it is more childcare. Those are all issues we can discuss, but they are not, obviously, infrastructure issues. Proposing to pay for this huge plan with taxes on American workers makes it even worse. So the $2.3 trillion plan is not mostly infrastructure--80 percent is not--but then the taxes that would apply to America and to American workers would be devastating, making us noncompetitive in the global economy again after finally we were getting our act together. In 2018 and 2019, we saw a big increase in our economy, large increases in terms of employment. Also, wages were going up. We had the lowest poverty rate in the history of our country, going back to the 1950s, partly because we were putting in place policies that made sense in terms of tax reform to create more incentives to invest and bring jobs here to this country. That would all be changed under these tax increases that are being proposed to pay for this big, new Biden infrastructure package. Making us less competitive in global markets and putting American workers at a disadvantage again is not the right way to go. The American people don't want that. The American people think we should be doing all we can to get businesses back on their feet right now so that people can get employment and so we can ensure that the economy continues to improve as we come out of the coronavirus pandemic. Infrastructure, again, has always been so bipartisan. Why would, in this case, we want to take it down the partisan road? Past Presidents, by the way, have shown that they can get big things done early in their administration. So during this first hundred days, there was an opportunity to reach out. I hope in the second hundred days, it will be different. Let me give a couple of examples. When President Bill Clinton got elected, he worked with Republicans and Democrats to pass what was called the North American Free Trade Agreement. He got a lot of support from the Republican side of the aisle--in fact, even more than he got from the Democratic side of the aisle--and he pushed that through. Ronald Reagan's economic reforms of 1981 passed the Senate with an overwhelming margin of 89 to 11. Last night, C-SPAN allowed us to look back in history at some of the speeches Presidents gave after their first hundred days. One was Ronald Reagan's speech to the joint session that I saw last night. It was amazing. Republicans and Democrats alike were standing because President Reagan said: ``I want to work with all of you.'' And he showed he would work with all of them by passing those economic reforms in 1981. We should all want the Biden administration to succeed in putting in place bipartisan policies that help our constituents and help our country, but that can only happen if they agree to reverse course and engage with Republicans in a genuine way. That is clearly what the American people want. In a recent poll, a Washington Post and ABC poll, 60 percent of respondents, including two-thirds of Independents, said they wanted the Biden administration to work with Republicans to make these proposals bipartisan--twice the number that wanted him to pursue the partisan path chosen so far. I suggest to my constituents in Ohio and all Americans who will be listening tonight: Don't just listen to the rhetoric; look at the action because the rhetoric thus far has not been matched by actions. We were promised bipartisanship as a path toward unity. For the sake of our country, it is time to keep that promise. I yield the floor

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I appreciate the thoughtful comments from my colleague from Oklahoma of the need for us to have an independent judiciary. I am on the floor to talk about a different issue, and it is the latest, very troubling information that we are receiving regarding the addiction epidemic and specifically drug overdose deaths in the United States. I am also going to talk about some of the steps we can take right now to address that reality. One of the top priorities I have had in this body and in the House has been this drug addiction issue. Frankly, this is a moment of frustration because we were making progress, and then COVID-19 hit. Unfortunately, the drug epidemic has hit my State of Ohio particularly hard. The latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, show that it is a pretty grim picture right now, and it should be a wake-up call to all of us. Overdose deaths rose nearly 30 percent nationwide from September 2019 to September 2020. During this time period, you can see the overdose deaths numbers going up dramatically. This is heartbreaking for me because we were making progress. After literally decades of increases in drug overdose deaths every single year--decades--going back to the 1990s, we finally here in the 2017, 2018, 2019 periods began to make progress in reducing overdose deaths. In fact, in Ohio, we had a 24-percent decrease in overdose deaths during 1 year, 2018, but, right now, the numbers are getting higher and higher, and it is everywhere. As you can see from this chart, if something is in any of these colors, this means that there is an increase in overdose deaths. If it is in blue, it means there is a decrease, and this was just during this period of September 2019 to September 2020, the latest data for which we have good information. It doesn't even include all of 2020, and as we know, the pandemic, unfortunately, went all the way through 2020 and into 2021. All of the data show that, as you got further into the pandemic, we had higher rates, so we expect, when the final data come out for 2020, it will be even higher. Here is where we are now. Look at this. Other than the State of South Dakota, every single State has seen an increase--and a substantial increase in many cases--in overdose deaths. This is in 49 of 50 States. In my own State of Ohio, there has been about a 25-percent increase in overdose deaths during this period. Only a few years ago, again, we were making progress. One reason that we had begun to turn the tide was because of work that had been done here in the U.S. Congress. Right around this time period, we passed legislation called the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. We also passed legislation called the 21st Century Cures Act. Both were signed into law in 2016. So it would have been in this period. It became effective in this period and actually helped to reduce overdose deaths for the first time in decades. I commend my colleagues for that legislation. It was the first time we had ever funded recovery, as an example. We also funded prevention and treatment and provided our law enforcement with more naloxone, this miracle drug that reverses the effects of an overdose. Many of my colleagues have had the opportunity to speak with their local addiction boards or have been with law enforcement or other first responders-- firefighters--who have used this naloxone effectively to save lives. So things were getting better until we saw this big increase in connection with the coronavirus pandemic. The stresses of this unprecedented time, clearly, have contributed to the spike in drug abuse. People have felt lonelier. People have felt more isolated. Specifically, people have not been able to get access to recovery programs. Being in person with a recovery coach is a whole lot different than being on a Zoom call. That is what I hear from recovering addicts, and it makes sense. I will say that people have turned to drugs to cope during this tough period, but also, many of those who are in recovery have been stalled in their progress because of their inability to be with other recovering addicts. So part of the best practices and best scientific evidence we have is that an effective way to help people overcome their addictions is to be with other people who also have those addictions. We have known this for years in terms of alcohol treatment programs--AA and so on--but this has been one of the problems. Another issue I am going to raise, which apparently is somewhat controversial, but I hear it from the experts--and those are the people on the ground, in the field, who are dealing with this issue--is that, when we here in Congress provided lump sums to all Americans under a certain income--and you will remember the individual payments--they didn't go out right away because our State offices couldn't process them quickly enough, particularly with regard to unemployment insurance, wherein our workers' comp and our unemployment offices could not get the money out the door on a weekly basis but could retroactively provide those funds. We had individuals getting--instead of $300 a week or $600 a week-- $10,000 a week because it was an accumulation of many weeks. People were owed that, but getting these big lump sums was not helpful in the context of many people who were in recovery because it led to their purchasing drugs and it led to what we are finding out--again, back home--in talking to the experts, were some of the reasons you had this spike. So there are a lot of reasons here. I guess what we need to focus on now is, How do we get beyond this? These deaths are happening away from the national headlines because the coronavirus is taking the national headlines, understandably. A story just last week, from a news station in Dayton, OH, summed it up perfectly with a quote from Lori Erion, who is the founding president of Families of Addicts. She said: During the pandemic, addiction and families struggling with it haven't gone anywhere. We have been here the whole time. But they have not gotten much notice. There were 87,000 people who died from overdoses in the September 2019 to the September 2020 period we talked about. There were 87,000 Americans who died. If not for the COVID-19 pandemic, I don't think we would have seen this increase--from everything we are hearing if the correlation is almost precise--but also we would be hearing a lot more about the addiction crisis and doing more about it here. We did put some funding into the CARES Act and into the two most recent COVID-19 packages to help with behavioral health, people's mental health, and also with addiction. That has been helpful, but we need to go much broader and do something much more comprehensive to take this moment to recommit ourselves to fighting addiction and ensuring that more Americans don't continue to lose their lives to overdoses. We have bipartisan legislation that has been introduced that we have been working on with a lot of people on the outside to try to come up with some new ideas, some ways to address this problem. In the 5 years since this Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery legislation has become law, which was in part the reason we saw this reduction--also, a lot of great work was done at the local level and the State level--the substantial, several billion-dollar commitment we made here in this Chamber for more prevention, treatment, and longer term recovery with naloxone and so on, made a difference, but it has been 5 years. During that time, I have visited with literally hundreds of different organizations in my home State. I have also just talked to a lot of experts about this. I have been to a lot of nonprofits, from Cleveland to Cincinnati and from Portsmouth to Toledo. I have talked to literally hundreds of recovering addicts about what works and what doesn't work for them. There is legislation that we are introducing now, which we call CARA 3.0. We had the first Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, and we had a second one back in 2018, a smaller one. Now we have this new, bipartisan CARA 3.0 legislation. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is my coauthor, but we have a number of Members who have joined up to help, and it addresses three major areas. One is research and education. We still need to find out more, and we still need to get better research and better alternatives to opioids to deal with pain because much of this is being driven, as you know, from opioids--both heroin and prescription drugs but also these new synthetic opioids, which are the deadliest of all. Second, we focus on education. Getting the prevention message out there is incredibly important to keep people from coming into the funnel of addiction in the first place, which is incredibly powerful and effective. Third, of course, are treatment programs. The fourth is recovery. Again, Congress had never funded recovery before; yet all of the best science shows that these recovery programs, when done properly, can be incredibly helpful, and longer term recovery, unfortunately, is needed, which is costly, but the alternative is worse. Finally, there is criminal justice reform, which I will talk about in a moment. It will bolster our work to prevent drug abuse before it happens through funding for research and education. A new national drug awareness campaign is part of this legislation, and the research and development of alternative pain treatment methods that don't lead to addiction is part of it. CARA 3.0 will also take the important step of addressing the disproportionate effect the addiction crisis has had on people in poverty and communities of color. Unfortunately, during this increase, we have seen a higher percentage of overdoses in communities of color. A national commission has been formed to look at this issue to better develop treatments and best practices to avoid overdoses. Second, our bill will build on what works and how we treat addiction. It will double down on proven, evidence-based addiction treatment methods while expanding treatment options for groups that are particularly vulnerable to addiction, including young people, new and expecting mothers, rural community residents, and communities of color-- individuals who live in those communities. One of the things that we have learned through, again, evidence-based research into what works and what doesn't work is that medication-assisted treatment, when done properly, can be very effective. It will also make permanent the current expanded telehealth options for addiction treatment that were created temporarily in response to the social distancing required by the COVID-19 pandemic. This is really important. Telehealth is one of the few silver linings in an otherwise very dark cloud of the coronavirus pandemic. Yet, for many individuals, telehealth was effective, particularly with regard to behavioral health and addiction services. So we want to be sure that the temporary ability to pay for those telehealth visits, as an example, through Medicaid as an example or Medicare, can continue past the pandemic. CARA 3.0 will also bolster the recovery options for individuals who are working to put addiction behind them through funding to support recovery support services and networks. It will enable physicians to provide medication-assisted addiction treatments, like methadone, to a greater number of patients and change the law to allow these drugs to be prescribed via telehealth for a greater ease of access. This will require a change in legislation to allow people to provide these kinds of treatments. Our bill will also destigmatize addiction recovery in the workplace by ensuring that taking one of these medications--again, medications to get people over their addictions--will not count as a drug-free workplace violation. This may seem like an obvious change, but, unfortunately, it will take a change of law to be able to make that happen. Finally, CARA 3.0 reforms our criminal justice system to ensure that those who are struggling with addiction, including our veterans, are treated with fairness and compassion by the law, putting them on a path to recovery instead of into a downward spiral of drug abuse. Importantly, CARA 3.0 funds a Department of Justice grant program to help incarcerated individuals who are struggling with addiction to receive medication-assisted treatment while they are still in the criminal justice system. Again, that may seem like a pretty obvious solution, but there are people who go into the system addicted, and they come out addicted. They are not given the treatment options when they are incarcerated, and they simply go back to lives of addiction. Those people have high rates of recidivism, clearly. Most are rearrested and are back in the system within a relatively short period of time. So this will reduce recidivism, repeat offenses. It makes sense for the person addicted, and it certainly makes sense for the community, with fewer crimes being committed. It also makes a lot of sense for the taxpayer because that treatment, although there is an additional expense while in the criminal justice system, will have a much better chance of getting those people back to lives wherein they can go back to work, back to their families, be in recovery, and not be back in the expensive criminal justice system. So it is a win-win-win. CARA and CARA 2.0 gave States and local communities new resources and authorities to make a real difference in my State and others. CARA 3.0 renews and strengthens those programs, and given the recent spike in addiction we see here, it provides a significant boost in funding as well. When added with the existing CARA programs that were authorized through 2023, we will be investing well over $1 billion per year to address this longstanding epidemic, putting us on the path toward a brighter future free from addiction. Another important part of CARA 3.0 is our bipartisan legislation to build on this expanded telehealth option for addiction services. It was necessary during the pandemic to have it because of social distancing. We found out that, although there is no substitute for face-to-face interaction, telehealth has kept patients in touch with their doctors and allowed physicians to prescribe medication-assisted treatment remotely. It doesn't make sense to get rid of these options once the pandemic goes away, so again, CARA 3.0 included legislation we had previously introduced separately called the Telehealth Response for E-Prescribing Addiction Therapy, or the TREATS Act, to make permanent a number of temporary waivers for telehealth services and bolster telehealth options for addiction treatment services. Specifically, it does a couple things. First, it allows for a patient to be prescribed these lower scheduled drugs, like SUBOXONE, through telehealth on their first visit. You can't do that now. Current law requires you to go in person for a visit when needing an initial prescription for controlled substances, but this has been a deterrent to patients in crisis and in urgent need of treatments from schedule III or schedule IV drugs, like SUBOXONE or certain other drugs for a co-occurring mental health condition. It also limits abusive practices by both audio and visual capabilities to be able to interact with the treatment providers to reduce fraud and abuse when it is your first visit, and it would also keep the existing requirements for in-person visits when prescribing schedule II drugs--these are the harder drugs, like opioids and stimulants--which are much more prone to being abused through these telehealth visits. So we have a provision in there to avoid abuse, but it is also important to continue this telehealth when other options aren't there. I think it is a balanced approach that makes sense. Second, our bill will allow for Medicare to bill for audio only or telephone telehealth visits for mental health and substance abuse if it is not the patient's first visit. Due to access to the broadband or distance, in-person or even video appointments aren't always possible, particularly for our seniors. We need to focus on safety and robust treatment options, but in order to balance the needs of patients, we have proposed to allow our Nation's seniors under Medicare to use phones for subsequent mental health or behavioral health visits when they don't have access to the internet and where fact-to-face interaction isn't possible and isn't as necessary. I believe the TREATS Act will make a difference in the addiction treatment space and will help us prevent more untimely overdoses. So the legislation I have laid out so far--CARA 3.0 and the TREATS Act--cover an important aspect of the addiction crisis: the addiction treatment efforts that help lessen the demand for drugs, which is the single most important thing, reducing that demand. But there is also more we have to do on the supply side because as drugs are pouring into our country, they are at a lower price on the streets of Cincinnati or Columbus or Cleveland or Dayton or Toledo. So we do need to do more to curb the supply of these dangerous substances. This is especially true right now because there is such a critical crisis ongoing, and there is a looming deadline to keep one class of very dangerous drugs illegal and off the streets. I am talking about the kinds of opioids that are--like fentanyl, that are synthetic opioids but have a slight molecular change. So unless we act here in Congress, they will no longer be scheduled, no longer be illegal. Data from the CDC, again, shows that the biggest driver to this surge in overdose deaths that we see here comes from fentanyl, comes from these synthetic opioids. They are often far more deadly than traditional opioids, like heroin. In fact, fentanyl is 50 times more powerful than heroin. A pound of fentanyl is lethal enough to kill a half a million people. And fentanyl, as you will find out talking to your law enforcement folks and others in the treatment space, it is often now being laced with other drugs, like cocaine, like crystal meth or heroin. Most of this synthetic opioid is being illegally manufactured in China and then smuggled across our borders, either coming in through the mail system or going to Mexico and then being smuggled across. There is also evidence now that it is also being produced in Mexico, which is a change and a major concern. In order to avoid prosecution, prior to 2018, scientists in China-- evil scientists in China--and drug traffickers started making slight modifications to fentanyl, sometimes adjusting a single molecule and creating what are essentially fentanyl copycats. While these fentanyl-related substances have the same narcotic properties as fentanyl, their tiny variations allowed them to evade prosecution. But oftentimes, these similar substances, like carfentanil, which some of you are aware of, are even deadlier than fentanyl itself. To address this, the Drug Enforcement Agency in 2018 used its authority to temporarily classify all fentanyl-related drugs as schedule I substances, which allows law enforcement to aggressively intercept and destroy these substances. Unfortunately, this designation was only temporary. That is all DEA could do. So, in 2019, Congress extended that designation until May 6, 2021, so a 2-year extension until 14 days from now. If that deadline lapses 14 days from now, criminals who run labs in China and Mexico will be able to avoid law enforcement as they flood the United States with unlimited slight variants of fentanyl that are just as deadly. We can't let that happen. Let me say that again. At a time when we are experiencing an alarming rise in overdose deaths that we see here, and fentanyl is the major culprit, the No. 1 killer, we may face a situation where law enforcement will lose the ability to aggressively stop these fentanyl copycats in the United States unless Congress acts in the next 14 days. Fortunately, we have legislation to do that. Our bipartisan FIGHT Fentanyl Act, which I introduced with Senator Joe Manchin, will fix this problem by permanently classifying fentanyl-related drugs as schedule I drugs. It would give our law enforcement certainty to go after synthetic opioids in all their forms and show we are committed to addressing the threat posed by this dangerous class of drugs. Our proposal is the one bipartisan approach to this in the Senate. We structured it to address concerns from the criminal justice community and made sure it does not impose mandatory minimum sentencing under criminal charges brought under our bill. That has been one of the concerns expressed, particularly by some on the other side of the aisle. So we took that out. I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to come to the table and support this urgent legislation. The House just passed a 5-month extension this week. That is, to me, very sad. Let's make this permanent. There is no reason to do a short- term extension and to create the uncertainty with law enforcement, and, frankly, to tell these evil scientists in places like China, in 5 months, you are going to be able, potentially--to be able to sell this substance again without worrying about the law. This makes no sense. Let's make it permanent. Let's give the DEA the authority to do what they need to do. And by doing so, let's reduce the amount coming in, which increases the cost on the street, which is an important step toward rededicating our efforts to stop these drugs from stealing thousands of lives and causing so much pain. In conclusion, I urge my colleagues--our Nation faces a crisis. It is the coronavirus pandemic that is finally winding down, but it is also the addiction crisis. It has been happening underneath the coronavirus. As was said by my constituent--this woman who unfortunately has faced addiction in her own family--we have been here the whole time, and it hasn't gotten better; it has gotten worse. Many of its victims are suffering in silence. We know a lot about what is going on with COVID. We don't know a lot about what is going on with this pandemic, this epidemic of drugs. So let's act now, without delay. We have 14 days until DEA loses the authority to go after dangerous fentanyl copycats, but we can do something about it. We can pass legislation right now that will help people at their point of pain, as well as provide law enforcement the tools to cut off the source of their suffering--both the CARA 3.0 legislation to deal with the demand side and the legislation to be sure this poison can't come into our communities freely. As the CDC data shows, this is an issue that affects every single one of us. Forty-nine States have seen a big increase. We know we need to do it. Let's not wait any longer to get to work once again turning the tide on our addiction crisis. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I welcome the Vice President, the President of the Senate, to our Chamber this evening. I am here this evening to discuss the infrastructure plan that has been proposed by President Biden and the plan along with it for massive tax increases. The Biden infrastructure plan totals a massive $2.3 trillion, but only about 20 percent of it actually goes towards funding anything that Members of either party have ever considered infrastructure. I support more infrastructure investment, as do, I believe, most if not all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle. The question is, What is infrastructure, and how do you pay for it? Roads and bridges, as an example in this proposal, are only about 5 percent of the plan. In fact, it provides more money for long-term care than it does for roads and bridges, more money for electric cars than it does for roads and bridges, and more money for schools and daycare than it does for roads and bridges. Many of these noninfrastructure ideas are worthy ones, and they should be debated and they should be considered but not as part of a self-described infrastructure bill, in part because the funding sources should be very different. The price tag, $2.3 trillion--soon to be $2.7 trillion, we are told-- and also the scope of the bill are bad enough, but what I want to talk about tonight is the equally concerning way the Biden administration plans to pay for this massive new legislation. They want to pay for the bulk of it by completely reversing the progress we made over the past few years in making America competitive again and making our workers competitive again. In the 2 years before COVID-19, we saw record growth in jobs and wages, in large part thanks to the pro-growth policies we put in place through the 2017 tax cuts and reforms. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has found that 70 percent of the savings from the 2017 corporate tax cuts went into workers' wages. Seventy percent, they say, went into workers' pockets. It is one reason that, leading up to the pandemic in February, a year and a couple of months ago, we had the 19th straight month--19th straight month--of wage growth of 3 percent or more annually. That was great news in my home State of Ohio. We hadn't had wage growth like that in over a decade, maybe two decades. Most of that benefit, by the way, went to middle and lower income workers--exactly what you want. During that time period a couple of years before the pandemic hit, we tied the 50-year low in unemployment at 3.5 percent and had the lowest unemployment ever for Blacks and Hispanics. In fact, before the pandemic, we had reached the lowest poverty rate--10.5 percent--since we started recording this data back in 1959. It was the lowest poverty rate on record. Importantly, tax reform also stopped these corporate inversions. You will remember this. Companies were actually becoming foreign companies so they could get from under our Tax Code. This made no sense. It was happening during the Obama administration and during the first year of the Trump administration. We also ended the so-called lockout effect, caused by a Tax Code that made it too expensive to bring foreign earnings back home. So people kept their earnings overseas. In fact, during those couple of years, the $1.6 trillion in overseas earnings has now come back home to invest and create jobs here--$1.6 trillion. We want that money here. As a result of those changes, the largest U.S. companies increased domestic research and development spending by 25 percent to $707 billion, and capital expenditures went up by 20 percent to $1.4 trillion. The Biden plan would throw all of that positive progress out. It would change our competitiveness to put us back where we were before or worse. The administration's corporate tax increase raises the combined Federal and State corporate rates from an average of 25.8 percent to 32.8 percent. It would put us, again, as having the highest rate in the developed world. These tax hikes, by the way, when you include the international tax hikes, are actually five times as large as the corresponding cuts in 2017, based on the analysis that has been done. By the way, this would also, of course, give us not just the highest tax rate among the developed countries but also a far higher tax rate than countries like China with whom we are trying to compete. It also changes the international tax code to make it much more costly for U.S. companies to operate outside of the United States, punishing American workers who have jobs here supporting international sales. I use the example of Procter & Gamble in my hometown of Cincinnati. They are headquartered in Ohio, but they do business all over the world. They have told me that it will be far more expensive for them to do that, even uncompetitive for them to be working globally, because we will be the only developed country in the world that will charge them a tax to do that, and that will hurt the jobs in Cincinnati, OH, that support international sales. It just doesn't make any sense. Why would we want to go back to that and have that lockout effect where profits are kept overseas and where companies actually become foreign companies? In the Biden plan, it also eliminates the so-called foreign-derived intangible income provision. This was a carrot that we put in the law very deliberately, a carrot for companies to bring their intellectual property back here. By the way, that is what Google did. So did Cisco. So did Qualcomm. So did Synopsys. So did Facebook. They actually brought valuable intellectual property back home, creating high-paying high-tech jobs here in the United States of America. Why would we want to change that? The bottom line is that this tax plan that has been proposed would make us uncompetitive again in the global economy, and the Biden administration knows it. That is why, when Treasury Secretary Yellen announced the proposal to increase these taxes, she actually asked other countries around the world to raise their own corporate taxes. She pleaded with them: We are going to raise ours. You need to now raise your taxes. Of course, when she said we need to do that to create a more level playing field, other countries in the world said: This is great. We are going to get more American investment and more business for our companies. In fact, right after she made that announcement, the Minister for Finance in Ireland was asked the question. He said he had no interest in joining America in raising taxes--nor do others. China is not going to raise its taxes. In fact, these countries are continuing to do what they have been doing, which is to knock down barriers to jobs and investment in their economies, and that makes sense from their points of view. It makes sense from our point of view to continue to be competitive also. The tax increases would leave America standing alone atop the corporate tax rate chart. Studies by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and others have shown that, again, it is American workers who will bear the brunt of these corporate tax hikes in the form of lost jobs and lower wages. Because of the tax hikes, the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Wharton model, in analyzing this Biden plan, actually projects that we will see a nearly 1-percent decrease in the GDP and a 0.7-percent decrease in wages by 2031 over current projections. Now, this is extraordinary to me because that is despite the economic benefit--the obvious benefit--we are going to get from this infrastructure spending. So, despite all of that benefit, we are still going to see a reduction in our economy, or economic growth, and a reduction in wages. This harms American workers, particularly those toward the bottom of the economic ladder. The bottom line is that the $2.1 trillion tax hike used to pay for this infrastructure bill will harm middle-class families and our businesses, and I believe the American people get that. They recognize that this is not the way forward for our economy or for our infrastructure. Instead, let's follow the proven bipartisan model on infrastructure. Let's keep the plan to real infrastructure. Let's agree to what it is. Let's do it generously. Let's include broadband. Let's include water projects. Let's make it real infrastructure, though. Then let's come up with sensible pay-fors, including user fees. That is what the American people want, and that is what they deserve. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, my friend and colleague Senator Manchin from West Virginia and I are on the floor today to talk about this issue of fentanyl. This is a deadly synthetic opioid that is killing more people in our States than any other single drug. Unbelievably, Congress has only 15 days to act, and if we don't, some of these illegal fentanyl products are going to be legal again. This is exactly the wrong thing for us to do right now as, sadly, we are seeing a big increase in overdoses and overdose deaths because of the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. We want to have bipartisan legislation that we have introduced, passed, that simply says: Let's not allow these illicitly manufactured and deadly synthetic opioids to suddenly become legal again. If we don't act within 15 days, that will happen. Our bill would ensure that these deadly drugs continued to be scheduled--that is the technical term--scheduled by the Drug Enforcement Agency, meaning they would continue to be illegal. Here is why we have to act. Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, is more than 15 times more powerful than heroin, and it is incredibly addictive. For years, this has been coming to our shores from China, almost all of it through the mail until recently because we, frankly, passed legislation to cut down on mail deliveries, and instead, now much is coming through Mexico, across our southwest border. It is a big reason overdose deaths in the United States surged to record highs during this COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 87,000 Americans--think about that--87,000 Americans died during the 12-month period between September 2019 and September 2020. That is a record. It is a terrible record. When we have the actual numbers from 2020, it is going to be even worse. We just got these numbers from September 2019 until September 2020. When we have the numbers from January 2020 through December 2020, it will be even worse. That is what everybody says, and it makes sense. When you look at this data, the worst months are the months during the pandemic in 2020. Again, we are very sadly, after several years of progress, looking at once again an increase in these overdose deaths. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, synthetic opioids like fentanyl are the biggest drivers of this tragic surge. We can project that more than half of these deaths are from this class of drug based on what we know from the 2019 data. That is the latest information we have. In 2019, there were 70,630 deaths, and more than half of those-- 36,359--involved fentanyl. Experts believe that fentanyl, sometimes mixed with other drugs like cocaine or crystal meth or sometimes heroin, continues to be the No. 1 killer. It is such an enormous crisis because these drugs are so incredibly dangerous. It takes only 2 milligrams of fentanyl to kill an adult, which is why the DEA, Drug Enforcement Administration, permanently classified fentanyl as a schedule II drug. In order to avoid prosecution, drug traffickers started making slight modifications to fentanyl. You have some evil scientist in China or in Mexico who makes a slight modification to fentanyl, sometimes adjusting a single molecule and creating what are called fentanyl analogs. In other words, it is not precisely pure fentanyl, and so unfortunately, although it has the same narcotic properties as fentanyl, these tiny variations allow these traffickers and these scientists to evade prosecution. Oftentimes, by the way, these analogs, like carfentanil, are even more deadly, believe it or not, than fentanyl itself. In response, in 2018, the DEA temporarily scheduled fentanyl analogs, but under law, that designation expires after May 6--again, only 15 days from now. If that deadline lapses, evil scientists and criminals who run labs in China and Mexico will be able to avoid law enforcement as they flood the United States with unlimited slight variations of this deadly drug. That is why Senator Manchin and I are calling on Congress to do the sensible thing: Pass the FIGHT Fentanyl Act to make these dangerous substances permanently illegal. That is what law enforcement wants, that is what our communities demand, and that is what we deserve to give them. It is long overdue that we make this designation permanent. China, by the way, implemented classwide controls over fentanyl analogs in 2019. China's law defines fentanyl-related substances more broadly than the U.S. Government defines fentanyl-related substances. How ironic. Here is China, a country sending us this poison and actually making these drugs illegal in China, and they are not illegal here. How could that be? I know some 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. First, I share this concern about the harsh punishments that don't fit the nature of the crime. 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 is addressed. There has been a great deal of conversation about the impact of prosecutions and incarcerations on specific populations, including minority communities, but what is often lost in this debate is the growing impact of fatal overdoses in these same communities. Since 2016, while White fatalities decreased through 2019--the data we have--overdoses from opioids among Black Americans, particularly Black men, have actually accelerated. From 2011 to 2016, Black Americans had the highest increase in synthetic opioid-involved overdose death rates compared to all populations. So it is getting worse, not better, in these same minority communities. While from 2017 to 2018, overall opioid-involved overdose fatalities decreased--remember we were making progress for the last several years. Overall, it decreased by just over 4 percent. Rates among Black and Hispanic Americans actually increased. Another issue my colleagues have raised, again, is concern that permanently scheduled fentanyl and its analogs somehow hinders research in treating addiction. First of all, I agree that we need this research and need it badly. One example of this is coming up with naloxone, a miracle drug based on heroin that actually reverses the effects of overdose. 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 development of new treatments. I am open to working with colleagues to address these barriers, and I believe we can do that through legislation creating flexibility in the registration system for scientists. But we cannot let these deadly fentanyl drugs become legal in the meantime, and certainly we can't allow this to happen in the next 15 days. Just before we came to the floor this afternoon, the House of Representatives passed a temporary measure. It is a 5-month extension of the ability to schedule these deadly drugs. Why would we do it for just 5 months? Let's do it permanently. Now I am told: Well, we have a take-it-or-leave-it from the House. I hope that is not the case. If so, of course I will be for extending it rather than having it expire in 15 days. But let's act. Let's act responsibly. Let's act now. The U.S. Senate should be taking the lead here in saying let's permanently classify these drugs, as everybody agrees they should be classified in the sense that they are dangerous narcotics that are killing literally tens of thousands of our fellow citizens every year. Let's do the right thing for those communities. 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 they can prosecute these criminals--these traffickers. We need to act now to address the threat of these deadly fentanyl drugs coming into our communities, and I urge the Senate to pass the FIGHT Fentanyl Act this week. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I am here on the floor of the Senate this evening to talk about our shared national priorities for addressing the Nation's infrastructure needs and my concerns--really deep concerns--about the plan the Biden administration has outlined and specifically the way they intend to pay for it. I don't think there is a single Member in this Chamber who does not recognize the need for us to invest in upgrading America's aging infrastructure. Our network of roads, bridges, ports, railroads, and more has played an integral role over the decades in growing our world-class economy. Yet, according to a 2019 report, the most recent one we have from the World Economic Forum, the United States now ranks only 13th in the world in infrastructure based on factors like the quality of our roads, how efficient our trains are, and access to electricity and water. So we can and should do more to improve our infrastructure, particularly as competitors like China make substantial investments in their own infrastructure every year. We can do so in a bipartisan way, just as we have always done. In fact, last Congress, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved bipartisan infrastructure legislation by a unanimous vote of 21 to 0. That was just last Congress, 21 to 0. This bipartisan approach last Congress totaled $287 billion--a substantial amount and one we have yet to figure out how to pay for. The current Transportation bill that is in play, the so-called infrastructure bill from a few years ago, is about $310 billion. Yet, even as we have to figure out how to fund the bipartisan $287 billion package for roads and bridges from last year--a substantial amount in its own right--the Biden administration recently introduced its own infrastructure plan that totals $2.7 trillion, almost 10 times as much. At the core of this Biden administration proposal is $620 billion in infrastructure broadly defined. It has a generous definition of the roads, bridges, and other physical transportation and water components that have traditionally been considered infrastructure. So a generous definition would be that out of the $2.7 trillion, $620 billion could be called infrastructure based on the way Republicans and Democrats alike have always looked at it, and again, that would include water, electricity, and other forms of transportation, not just roads and bridges. So about 20 percent of the Biden administration infrastructure bill actually fits the bill. The reason the overall package costs $2.7 trillion is because they have included a broad set of liberal priorities that are a far cry from what has ever been defined as infrastructure by either Democrats or Republicans. So, I guess, knowing the popularity of infrastructure--and it is popular; people want to see their roads and bridges repaired--the Biden administration has simply redefined the word to include hundreds of billions of dollars of spending on priorities like healthcare, Federal office buildings and other facilities, research and development, electric vehicle manufacturing, and more. According to the Biden administration, paid leave is now infrastructure, childcare is now infrastructure, and caregiving is now infrastructure. While many are worthy causes and should be debated and voted on separately, they don't belong in infrastructure bills. This approach is troubling to me and, I know, to many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle because it is a continuation of the raw partisanship that defined the latest COVID-19 spending package back in March. Rather than work to find good-faith negotiations with Republicans to craft a package that can gain bipartisan support, the Biden administration and Senate Democrats apparently are once again looking into potentially using reconciliation to jam Republicans--to pass another trillion-dollar-plus spending bill with a simple 50-vote majority. And, like COVID-19, infrastructure has always been bipartisan. So if you can't be bipartisan on COVID-19 and you can't be bipartisan on infrastructure, what can you be bipartisan about? This partisan approach, by the way, is the opposite of what President Biden pledged on the campaign trail and in his inauguration address. In his inaugural address, he talked about the need to get back to more bipartisanship and urged unity. I agreed with that assessment and said so at the time. Unfortunately, he has apparently listened to the more strident voices in his party and has gone down the partisan path. As with the $1.9 trillion COVID spending package last March, the end result could be another spending bill that is far higher than it needs to be at a time of record debt and deficits and another partisan bill that further divides us at a time when we are already too divided. In fact, about a quarter of the Biden plan is not paid for at all, taking us further into debt. But even more troubling to me is that the Democrats plan to pay for roughly $2 trillion of this plan with massive tax increases on American workers and consumers and by making us less competitive in the global economy. This would completely reverse the progress we have made over the past few years in making America competitive again. Thanks to the 2017 tax reforms that the Biden proposal would largely dismantle, in the couple of years before COVID-19, we saw record growth in jobs and wages, with the lowest poverty rate since the Federal Government started keeping track of it 60 years ago. In promoting the Biden tax increases, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen claims we need to reverse the 2017 tax reforms because they encourage businesses to move jobs out of the country. The reality is just the opposite. The 2017 tax reforms stopped the so-called corporate tax inversions, which caused American companies to become foreign companies and move jobs and investment out of America because of our uncompetitive tax laws. This happened to a number of companies in Ohio and in every State, practically, represented in this Chamber. The 2017 reforms also stopped the lockout effect that kept foreign profits of U.S. companies overseas. They weren't bringing the profits back. Instead, $1.6 trillion in overseas earnings has come back to the United States and was invested right here at home. Most importantly for working families, 70 percent of the savings from the corporate tax cuts went into workers' wages, contributing to 19 straight months of wage growth of over 3 percent annually that we enjoyed before the pandemic. This wage growth was really welcome in my home State Ohio. We had lower wages, or flat wages, for more than a decade. And, by the way, who benefited most from this wage increase--19 straight months of wage increases? Lower and middle-income workers-- exactly what should have been happening. Thanks to the 2017 reforms, the largest U.S. companies also increased their domestic research and development expenditures by 25 percent, which amounts to $707 billion more R&D. And they further increased capital expenditures by 20 percent, aided by this return of foreign profits. All of this U.S. investment, job creation, and new R&D would be put at risk by these proposed tax hikes. Under the Biden plan, which we have heard is raising the corporate rate from 21 to 28 percent, in actuality, the combined Federal and State corporate rate would go from 25.8 percent, where it is now when you include the State and Federal-- other countries like China don't have any State income tax on their corporations. They just have the Federal rate. So we would be going from 25.8 percent--by the way, which is already above the average of 23.4 percent for other developed countries, so-called OECD countries-- it would go from 25.8 percent up to a staggering 32.8 percent, the highest rate in the developed world. Our tax rate would once again be higher than China's and higher than any country in the developed world--Japan, Europeans. This is exactly what we got away from in 2017, and it was on a bipartisan basis. There was a consensus for us to do that--maybe not the exact rate, but the idea was to make America competitive again. I cochaired a task force with a fellow Senator, a Democrat from the across the aisle, Chuck Schumer, on the Finance Committee, and we came up with this idea of saying: Let's go to a territorial-type tax system, and let's lower the rate so that we can be competitive around the world. That is what happened, and it is working. Now, for some reason, the Biden administration says: We want to reverse all that. These abrupt tax hikes, which actually would be five times as large as the corresponding corporate tax cuts in 2017, would make our workers and our businesses less competitive globally at a time when our economy is just starting to recover. The Biden plan goes well beyond just making our tax rates uncompetitive again. It also doubles the tax on so-called global intangible low-taxed income, or GILTI, making it more costly for U.S. companies to operate outside the United States, more costly than any other country's companies of any developed country in the world. Again, it puts us at a competitive disadvantage. It unfairly punishes American workers who have their jobs here in America, supporting international operations. In Ohio, for example, we have Procter & Gamble. It is headquartered in my hometown. They rely on overseas production to serve foreign markets in an affordable manner. They are not going to ship diapers from here overseas because it is not cost-competitive. So, for the foreign markets, they will make diapers in those foreign countries. However, by doing so, they employ thousands of Ohioans and others around this country who support those international sales. So all the back-office work, the sales work, the research and development, and so on is done here. The proposed Biden tax increases would make such companies uncompetitive overseas, resulting in our losing markets there and losing U.S. jobs. Remember, no other developed country in the world does this except us. No other country taxes these companies on their foreign profits. We got away from that on purpose, and we essentially established a minimum tax, which, again, hardly any country in the world has, but we wanted to have some balance here. Now, under this proposal from the Biden administration, that tax would be more than double. It is going to hurt us. The Biden administration also proposes to eliminate a provision regarding what is called foreign-derived intangible income, FDII. In 2017, we put FDII in place for a very simple reason, and there seemed to be a consensus about that, which is to provide a carrot to U.S. companies to do their research and development here in America. It incentivized companies to bring that research back and to keep that research here. It worked to create high-skilled and high-wage jobs. For example, Google, Cisco, and Facebook brought all of their intellectual property home--brought all of their IP home. And we heard from other U.S. companies like Intel and Disney, which said they kept their IP in the United States due to this tax law change. Why would we want that to go overseas? The Biden administration claims that it wants the United States to be more competitive, yet these proposed tax increases do just the opposite. It makes no sense that while China and other countries are increasing subsidies to businesses that innovate, the United States would be punishing our workers and global companies, making them less competitive In what amounts to an astounding admission of how deeply flawed these proposals are, when Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced the proposal to increase taxes we just talked about, she actually went out of her way to make a plea to other countries around the world. She asked them to raise their own corporate tax rates and to increase their own taxes to ensure, as she said, a more level playing field. Understanding the nature of the intense global competition, our competitors are doing just the opposite. It is naive to think that because we are going to raise our taxes and ask them to do the same that they would do that. They want more of the jobs and investment in their country. In fact, just this past week, the Finance Minister of Ireland, when asked about this, said they have no interest in raising taxes. Ireland is one of those countries that has made themselves competitive and resulted in our tax law changes because they were taking jobs away from us, and now we were bringing this IP and these jobs back. Ireland, China, and these other countries are going to continue to lower barriers to attract capital and jobs. It is wishful thinking, at best, to think that because we are going to raise our taxes, they are going to raise theirs. The Biden plan would mean America standing alone atop the corporate tax rate chart among all developed countries--standing alone, leaving our businesses and workers to suffer the cost, a fact borne out from multiple studies, including from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that shows it is workers who bear most of the burden of higher taxes in the form of lower wages and lost jobs. It is not the corporations; it is the workers. As I said before, there is a clear need for us to reinvest in American infrastructure. I think we can all agree with that. Republicans and Democrats alike want to do it, and, right now, in the key committee of jurisdiction, by the way, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, bipartisan negotiations are ongoing. This is the same committee that had a unanimous vote last Congress on the transportation legislation. They are talking right now about how to put together a bipartisan package. That is the right way to do it: Go through regular order and allow Democrats and Republicans alike to offer their ideas. There is also a group of Republicans and Democrats outside of the committee who have met and are looking for a more sensible way forward. I am among that group. There are others as well. The partisan approach by the Biden administration looks to be taking us down the road of another trillion-dollar-plus spending package jammed through Congress with no support from the other side of the aisle. That is not good for this institution. It is not good for this country. It is not the way to get things done. Instead of a $2.7 trillion plan that goes beyond any reasonable definition of infrastructure and is mostly paid for with a devastating tax hike on U.S. workers and our economy, let's do what we know works: a bipartisan approach focused on what we have all agreed is infrastructure--roads, bridges, ports, rail, broadband, and other true infrastructure. I believe if we take that more targeted approach, we can build on the bipartisan framework this Congress has achieved in recent years and work together to find commonsense ways to fund infrastructure legislation, including user fees, which is what we have always used in the past, without resorting to partisan tax hikes, which reduce the competitiveness of U.S. workers, U.S. companies, and undermine investment in our country. I hope we take that better approach. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I thank the majority leader, and I thank the Presiding Officer for allowing me to speak this evening. I just returned from the southern border and want to give a brief report and talk about some potential ways forward to deal with what is happening on the Mexican border. I went with Secretary of Homeland Security Mayorkas and also with the chair of the Homeland Security Committee, my colleague from Michigan, and also with my colleague from West Virginia and my colleague from Connecticut, who are the chairs and ranking members of the Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Committee. We had a bipartisan group and those of us who were involved on the authorizing side and on the appropriations side. You probably heard that the situation is bad, and it is. There is a record number of unaccompanied children coming to our border today, being let in, and ending up in Border Patrol detention facilities. Just yesterday, CBP reported that there were more than 15,500 unaccompanied kids in Federal custody. That is a record. But it is not just children. More than 100,000 migrants were apprehended in February alone. This is a 15-year record, representing a 28-percent increase just since January. All the numbers from March look even higher. We won't know the final numbers for another couple of weeks, but the point is, it is getting worse, not better. These numbers, by the way, are worse than the previous two surges at our southern border--both the 2014 surge, we all remember, during the Obama administration and the 2019 surge during the Trump administration. And, by the way, we have yet to reach the predicted peak because that normally would happen in April and May. In fact, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, who was with us on this trip, said that he believes this will be the worst year in 20 years for unlawful entry into the United States. However, the numbers only tell part of the story. This is also a humanitarian crisis. Migrants often face violence, sickness, and tough terrain on their dangerous journey north--predominantly, those from the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. Many are abused by the smugglers who charge them large amounts of money and bring them. Unfortunately, this is a crisis that could have been avoided. On day one, the Biden administration issued five Executive orders to overturn Trump policies and since has taken more than a half dozen additional actions to dismantle policies from the previous administration. These included a 100-day pause on all deportations; no longer using the COVID-19 healthcare emergency under title 42 of the United States Code to turn away unaccompanied children and some families; suspending the construction of the border fence and technologies, such as sensors and scanners used by the Trump administration to help our overworked Border Patrol agents secure key stretches of our southern border; and abandoning the migrant protection protocols, also known as ``Remain in Mexico,'' which required some asylum seekers at the southern border to remain in Mexico rather than in the United States while their claim for asylum is being processed; and, of course, proposing an amnesty bill on day one. The administration has every right to do that, but it creates a disincentive to push back on new migrants coming in who are trying to get into the United States before that amnesty might become law. It certainly does unless you also make it clear that you don't qualify for amnesty unless you are already here. And I think that is an important message that I hope will be part of any future discussions about any kind of an amnesty bill so it doesn't encourage more people to come. The Biden administration took these and other actions that incentivize people to head north but then said: Please don't come yet. We are not ready for you. It was no surprise that didn't work. An unprecedented number of children and families came to take advantage of the new policies. As I heard on the southern border over the last few days, actions speak louder than words. And the actions of the new administration were clear. These abrupt moves to dismantle the immigration policies that were working to provide a disincentive for unlawful migrations hit the green light to a lot of people seeking a better life, but it also gave the smugglers and the human trafficking groups in the Northern Triangle and in Mexico the ability to convince more families and more children to take the dangerous trip north. It gave them a narrative, and, of course, they used it to their full advantage. That has overwhelmed Border Patrol and our immigration system, in general, unequipped to handle the surge. I heard directly from Border Patrol agents about how the current surge of unaccompanied kids is draining resources and endangering not just those vulnerable kids but the security of our own border It was stunning to see people who unlawfully crossed the border during a ride-along patrol I joined on Thursday night. People just kept coming. The Border Patrol told me they are seeing an increase of about 150 to 200 percent of illegal entries in the El Paso sector, with many illegal crossers escaping into the United States because they have not apprehended them. Just as concerning, they told me unaccompanied children and families are being used by the smugglers as a distraction so the smugglers can more easily move dangerous and illicit substances across the border into our communities. While the Border Patrol is busy processing the kids and the families, which takes a while, the smugglers move. In fact, Customs and Border Protection has reported an increase of 360 percent in seizures of the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl, which is 50 times deadlier than heroin. There is no question that more of this is now coming across the border. It is already resulting in a surge of overdose deaths, by the way, over the past year during the COVID-19 pandemic. In my home State of Ohio and around the country, it looks like, sadly, we are in for a record year of overdose and overdose deaths, primarily from fentanyl and fentanyl being mixed with other drugs. Fentanyl used to come from China directly, mostly through our mail system. Now, increasingly, it is coming from Mexico, since we passed legislation here to stop it coming through our mail system. Down at the border, I also had the opportunity to visit with the facilities where they are currently holding unaccompanied kids. These children are being kept in tightly packed facilities, supervised by overworked Border Patrol agents, law enforcement, who should be out in the field. Due to a lack of space for children in the Department of Health and Human Services facilities, Border Patrol is having to detain unaccompanied kids for an average of about 137 hours, nearly double the 72-hour limit required by law. I am concerned about the well-being of these kids, as we all are, because when the system gets overwhelmed, people, and especially the kids, suffer. And the processing system right now is overwhelmed; it is overcrowded; it is irresponsible. It is a situation you would never want your own children to be in. Not only are these children crammed into the facilities that are, by their own rules and regulations, overcrowded, there is no testing for COVID-19 in these facilities. Current policy is going to result in tens of thousands more children being released into our communities, waiting for their immigration court cases. During previous surges at the border that overwhelmed our immigration system, HHS stopped doing background checks on sponsors for unaccompanied kids, and many fell into the custody of abusive human traffickers. In 2014, for example, HHS placed Guatemalan children with criminals who put the children into forced labor on an egg farm in my home State of Ohio, where they were forced to live and work in squalid conditions. It is an issue I have worked a long time on. Between 2015 and to 2020, as chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, I led three bipartisan reports and hearings across two administrations that found repeated failures by the Federal Government to ensure the well- being of these vulnerable children once they were handed off to sponsors, as well as the fundamental refusal by HHS to accept that they were responsible for the welfare of these kids they placed with adults who are not their legal parent or guardian. Obviously, we are going to see a lot more pressure to get these kids out to as many sponsors as quickly as possible, and, again, I believe we are going to have some of these problems. Last week, I introduced bipartisan legislation called the Responsibility for Unaccompanied Minors Act that will direct the Federal Government to meet the stringent requirements necessary to ensure children are not abused or exploited by their sponsors; that they show up for their asylum hearings to determine their eligibility to stay in the United States. These are necessary steps to address the current crisis at our border and safeguard these children. By the way, on the debate as to whether to call the chaos at the border a crisis or not, when I was on the border talking to Border Patrol agents, one of them told me, although he believes it is a crisis, that he is fine not calling it a crisis now because he knows it is going to get much worse, and he wants to have something to call it then. He wants to see, like all Americans, concrete actions and a change of course at the border, much more than having a debate about words. By the way, we should all sympathize with those migrants who want a better life for their families. I sympathize with them. I am sure we all do. There are millions of people around the world who want to come to our country. We have a legal immigration system that accepts a million people a year. In addition to that, we accept refugees and those who apply for asylum. At the end of the day, those individuals coming to our southern border right now are making a rational choice to come to the border based on policy decisions by the Biden administration. What we need is a legal, orderly, and proper system to be sure the people follow the rules. The bottom line is, what I saw at the border is unsustainable, and, unfortunately, it is going to get worse. We are working against the clock to try to find a way forward. When the Biden administration changed the rules and dismantled the existing provisions that were keeping people from coming across the border, they could have put their own policies in place to try to deal with what everybody predicted was a surge that was coming. They didn't. More to the point, even if they weren't going to put their own policies in place, they should surely have waited until they had the facilities ready to handle the surge. They didn't. That is why you see this terrible overcrowding at Border Patrol detention facilities, holding these kids much longer than they should, and why you see HHS not having the beds prepared that they should have. By the way, some have said the Trump administration dismantled the asylum system. Well, because of the rules they had in place, there were very few people coming to apply for asylum. The facility I saw, which was a modern facility built just last year with $48 million of our taxpayer money, was built to try to deal with the next surge. Unfortunately, it is not big enough, and, again, it is overcrowded, so you have kids sleeping on the floor on thin foam mattresses with only a space blanket. None of them have been checked for COVID. They are living not 6 feet apart, as we are required to do here with social distancing, but inches apart and together. It is one thing to say we are going to change all these policies. It is another thing to say we are not going to put anything in its place or because that is OK--we are OK to have a surge come--at least to be prepared for that surge, and that is not what is happening. I believe there is a path forward for the Biden administration and the Congress to address this crisis in the short term; then work on medium- and long-term solutions to lower the risk of future surges. Here is what I would propose. First and foremost, the Biden administration should recommit to enforcing our immigration laws by providing overwhelmed Border Patrol agents and our Immigration and Customs the help they need to be able to ensure they can get what they need to be able to enforce the law. That means better pay for our Border Patrol. It also means better overtime provisions. We have legislation to do that. It also means ensuring that they have the tools they need to be able to protect the country. That means not stopping construction of the fence, which, by the way, is almost done. In the El Paso sector, I think there is 150 miles of fence totally--in total, 124 miles is already done. The parts that are not done, unfortunately, are some of the gates, so you have gaps. Border Patrol are very frustrated by this because they literally have to have people at the gaps because they can't monitor them as they can with the fence because with the fence, it takes people a while to get over the fence. With monitoring devices, which are, to me, more important even than the fence itself, they are able to do their jobs. They are also being told they can't continue the technology, so although there is 124 miles of fencing, there is much less technology than that. Yet they have been stopped from doing that as well. Let's give them what they need to be able to do their jobs. They are in an impossible situation. I am not talking about a new fence or a new wall, but at least for the part that has already been appropriated by Congress, let's complete it. Let's not leave these gaps. I literally saw the supplies they have. Construction material is on the ground, and the Border Patrol agents told me--these are rank-and- file Border Patrol agents: This is bad for morale. We see this stuff right there. If that could be put up to take the place of the temporary fencing migrants are able to simply push over or walk through, that would make our jobs much easier. No. 2, the asylum system needs to be changed immediately. Now, with a backlog of 1.2 million asylum seekers, they are waiting several years for court hearings to find out if they are qualified. During that time, they are living in the United States and often vanishing into the United States. We know from the data we have--and, by the way, the data is not very good on this--that only about half of them, maybe more or maybe less, are even showing up for their court cases. We know this because, for about 48 percent of those who are seeking asylum, there are now removal orders out for them for not showing up for their hearings. So about half of them have removal orders to be removed from the country because they haven't shown up for their hearings. Remember, this is a 1.2 million-person backlog, so it may be 3, 4, 5, 6 years before they get to their court cases. Is there any wonder some of these people are not showing up? Finally, at the very end of the process, after you go through all the adjudication, guess what the percentage of success would be for someone to achieve an asylum status: only 15 percent--15 percent--have a successful claim. So people are being told to go into the country and await their court cases, and 1.2 million people are doing that. It takes several years for that to happen. At the end of the day, only 15 percent will get asylum. Yet, again, many are not being removed even though there is a removal order out on them because the immigration system is overwhelmed, so they are focusing on those who have a criminal record, which I understand. This means, if you don't have a criminal record and you are in the United States, you know that it is unlikely you will actually be removed even if there is a removal order for you. So one policy change would be to simply resume a practice that was started in the last administration as a pilot and ended in November 2020. It is called the Prompt Asylum Claim Review process. An efficient and timely determination of who is eligible for asylum and who is not would really help. It would enable us to start reducing the number of migrants being held in custody and deter migrants who do not have a valid claim. You might say: Why not start with the 1.2 million backlog? That would be great. We should do that as well. We need more immigration judges. We need more lawyers involved in the process, on both sides, representing those who have the claim and representing the government. That would be good, but in the meantime, these rapid adjudications on the border with due process would have the effect of deterring the next migrant. Think about it. If you are just dealing with the last person on the list, the person who comes in most recently gets more of a deterrent than if you are dealing with the person who came in 4 or 5 years ago because they think: Well, if I get up there and make my claim and come into the United States and go out into one of the communities represented in this body, it will be 4 or 5 years before my court case comes up. Perhaps there will be amnesty during that period or something else or perhaps I will just stay. If you come to the border and you seek amnesty--you seek asylum--your claim will be adjudicated immediately, and you may receive asylum or you may not. Again, 15 percent is the number now. That is the best number we have, and that is from 2019. We don't have the numbers from 2020 yet Most think that is about what it will be. I think this is a good system. I don't know why it was ended in the Trump administration back in November. It shouldn't have been. I hope the new administration will take it up. As part of this, my colleagues from Texas and Arizona, Senator Cornyn and Senator Sinema, have suggested we stand up multiple regional processing centers to rapidly and fairly conduct asylum cases in one location. I support that. I think this idea is consistent with what I am talking about to discourage illegal immigration and to ensure that we have a quick decision with regard to asylum. Have all the Federal Agencies together--Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection, ICE, the Justice Department, HHS--everybody together in one place, and quickly make these decisions so that people aren't held for a long period of time, so they can have the decision made. I think it is worth the funding because it will be expensive. It will be expensive to hire the new immigration judges to have the system set up, but it is well worth it, in my view. Third, to deal with the asylum process, the Biden administration should look at the new Migrant Protection Protocols or ``Remain in Mexico'' policy. ``Remain in Mexico'' allowed us to keep our detention center populations down in the United States and asylum seekers close to the immigration courts while officials sorted out the claims. Getting rid of the policy served only to overcrowd our temporary housing and sent a lot more people into the interior, awaiting a hearing by an immigration judge. There are concerns about ``Remain in Mexico'' in terms of the conditions at some of the camps in Mexico. Although nongovernmental organizations play a substantial role there already, perhaps for those who are still in that process--and there are probably 45,000 people who are still in that process; there were initially maybe less, but, initially, there were about 75,000 people--a lot of people have just gone home because they don't want to remain in Mexico for their asylum claim. They would rather go back to their home in Northern Triangle countries--Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador--but for those who are there, perhaps there should be more oversight of those camps and more Federal funding provided through the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, HCR, and others to ensure those conditions are better. What the Biden administration is doing now is saying ``We are going to stop the program,'' and they are bringing people over the border. I saw this, the processing center. About 350 or 450 people a day are leaving the ``Remain in Mexico,'' the Migrant Protection Protocols Program, and coming into the United States. Those people are given the ability to come into the interior, so they are coming into communities in the United States. One thing you would hope they would get would be a notice as they go through the processing that says: Here is your court date. You have to show up at this court date. What we have learned in the last several days or what I learned down at the border is that they are not being given those court dates. They are given a piece of paper that has 24 ICE offices in the major metropolitan areas in America, and they are told: We don't know where you are going to end up. We don't know where you are going. You are welcome in the United States, but wherever you are going, please check into the ICE office in your region. My hope is we can at least get a system together where we don't, again, dismantle a program until we have something in its place to ensure people are going to their court dates to be able to have the asylum claims dealt with. On my trip to the border, I asked a reporter to come with me to the border wall because I believe it is important that the public know what is going on. I was surprised to learn that was the first time this reporter or other reporters had been able to kind of see what was going on for quite a while. They haven't been able to come into any of the detention facilities, including the processing center I talked about earlier, where the kids are crammed into--100 kids crammed into 1 room. I think the press should be able to see that because I think that will provide more transparency for all of us. My constituents don't know what is going on at the border, in part because the media haven't had that level of access. I know we have to protect the confidentiality of individual migrants, and I get that. I think that should be done. I think it can be done, but also by letting the media have that access, we would be able to have more transparency about the realities of what is going on along the border. So, fourth, I think the Biden administration should invest in finishing the work on the fence, as I said, but they should also work to enact something that is even more important than a fence, and that is to relieve the magnet. This is going to involve Congress. We did pass an immigration bill in this body with a strong provision called E-Verify several years ago. It basically says that for employers, there will be a sanction if you hire somebody who is not legal. The difference between E-Verify and some of the earlier programs that attempted to do that unsuccessfully is that E-Verify lets us use the new technologies we now have to ensure that fraudulent documents that are often used can be determined to be fraudulent. In other words, you can use technology--facial recognition and so on--to ensure that the employer knows for sure whether the person is legal or not. Again, this requires some Federal funding. Some of that software for small businesses, in particular, may be expensive, but to have an E- Verify Program that says you mandatorily--by the way, it is not mandatory right now either. It doesn't have the technology. It is not mandatory. You have to make it mandatory and say: If you want to hire somebody, you have to run them through the system. Make it as easy as possible to use the technology. In talking to the migrants I met--and my colleagues have spoken to many people who have come to this country, and I am sure they have had the same experience--when I asked them why they are coming here, they all have the same answer, basically, with slight variations, which is, as one guy told me from Guatemala, he can make 10 times as much money here. He cares about his family and their future. The economy is much better here, but that is because he knows he can get a job probably with a document, either a driver's license or a Social Security card that will be fraudulent, but he can buy it for 25 bucks. So we need a system here to stop the magnet. Don't put the Border Patrol and all of those involved--the immigration system is in such an impossible position that we have a wide-open system here where anybody can come and work. Let's do E-Verify. That is more important to me than any other enforcement tool that we have. Federal Reserve economists found that States that mandate the use of E-Verify reduce the number of likely unauthorized immigrants who stay in that State. Of course it does. Sixth--and this is the final one--the Biden administration should work with our Central American partners, including the Governments of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, to discourage unlawful migration. They can do that by incentivizing migrants to apply for asylum in their countries of origin. Some have said this should be mandatory. To me, that seems to make sense. Maybe there is a reason it shouldn't be mandatory, but it certainly should be encouraged, and these countries should certainly offer this. We should provide more aid to the countries of Central America because there is a push factor. Everything I have talked about so far is the pull factors, bringing them in. But if we do that, that aid ought to be conditioned on them helping us to provide people the ability to seek asylum in their own country. Where they have such a fear of persecution that they can't do it in their own country, they should be able to do it in a third country. There was a program started in the Trump administration that never really got off the ground, and it was called Safe Third Country. The program with Guatemala was starting to work. Honduras and El Salvador had signed up, but it hadn't started to work yet. Mexico didn't provide it. But what it says basically is, if you cross through a third country, you have to seek asylum in that third country. Specifically with Guatemala--as you know, you have to go through Guatemala coming from Honduras or El Salvador or Ecuador or elsewhere. Why not have the asylum claims done there? Again, due process, yes, but don't make people take this long and treacherous journey up to the southern border of the United States. Don't make them go through this process of the detention facilities and so on. Have them seek asylum in their own country or in other countries. That, to me, seems like it makes a lot of sense. The Biden administration suspended the Safe Third Country program on February 6, shortly after the inauguration. One program they would like to restart that I think makes sense is called the Central American Minors Program. They are going to restart that program now, starting in March. This is a program where, during the Obama administration, if you had a family member, a parent--it had to be a parent or a guardian--in the United States legally, then you could come through this program called CAM, Central American Minors Program. I am glad they have restarted that program. That makes sense. I will tell you, over 5 years, only 3,500 kids were processed in that program. Again, your parent has to be in the United States legally. There are 3,500 kids coming across our border every 9 days right now. So the program is not going to solve all our problems, but it will help, and that is a good idea. We need to take a hard look at all of this, at all of these pull factors we talked about and certainly at the push factors. I will say that the Biden administration has proposed $4 billion to go to these three countries--Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras. As a Congress, we have appropriated and $3.6 billion has been spent in the last 5 years in these three countries. So we have done almost that much in the last 5 years, and yet, because of the corruption, because of the lack of transparency, because of the lack of rule of law, the money has not been as effectively spent as it should have been. So we have to be sure the money is conditioned upon reforms to actually improve the lives of the individuals in those countries. Despite the corruption, we need to cut through that and say: If you take this money, you have to commit to the reforms. Second, again, it should be contingent upon helping with our asylum system to be sure that we can deal with this surge that we are now facing. If the Biden administration takes these six recommended actions I have laid out today, I believe we would move toward bringing a quicker end to this crisis on the border, and we would be able to secure our southern border with regard to the drugs that are coming over and other contraband and be able to say that we, together, worked on this. I know this is a time where everybody is in their corner, the Republicans and Democrats, and it is impossible, it seems like, to make progress. But I think these are pretty sensible ideas, and the alternative is a bad one: that this is going to get worse. You will have more and more kids in detention centers. You will have more and more families released to communities in the United States where they don't come forward for their hearings. And it is something that discourages people about our immigration system. It just doesn't seem to work. It is certainly not working on the border today. So my hope is that these ideas or others--maybe others in this Chamber have better ideas, but hopefully they can be bipartisan, and we can get some of this stuff done and actually deal with the crisis we all know exists and we have a responsibility to face. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I want to start by thanking Senator Ernst for once again setting up the Government Sunshine Week event and for her commitment, as was just discussed by my colleague from Florida, to ensuring taxpayers know where their money is going. This includes the $150 billion that the U.S. Government distributes every year in taxpayer funds for research grants. More transparency will help ensure that research isn't stolen by China and other countries. In 2019, as the then-chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, or PSI, I led a bipartisan investigation with then- ranking-member Senator Tom Carper into China's theft of U.S. intellectual property and U.S. research at our research institutions and college campuses. As many of you know, China has made no secret of its goal to surpass the United States as the world leader in scientific research. This has become even clearer, by the way, during the COVID-19 pandemic, as China has attempted to get information in the United States to help produce their own vaccines to rival ours. But what most don't know is that China has been using our taxpayer-funded research enterprise here in the United States to accomplish this long-term goal. China uses talent recruitment programs--most notably its Thousand Talents Plan--to recruit researchers at American universities and research institutions using taxpayer-funded grants to do the same research at shadow labs in China or transfer taxpayer-funded research back to China--research that has been used over the past two decades to strengthen China's military and its own economic rise. Along the way, they have been aided by a lack of transparency in our Federal grant-making process that has allowed researchers to receive taxpayer funding without disclosing their ties to foreign governments. What is worse, Federal law enforcement officials at the FBI knew about this for years and admitted at our PSI hearing last Congress: ``We wish we had taken more rapid and comprehensive action in the past.'' I wish they had. I am pleased the Trump administration chose to follow through on their promise to do better in this regard. Since our report, prosecutors have charged at least 13 researchers here in the United States for failing to disclose their ties to the Chinese Government and Chinese Communist Party--researchers at prestigious institutions like Harvard and the Ohio State University. Many of our colleges and universities around the country have been part of this. The Biden administration must stand by the promises made on the campaign trail to keep the pressure on China, and that includes on this issue. We can also help here in Congress by shining a light on the grant-making process and passing laws to help us keep track and protect these important investments in our research. In the coming weeks, I will be reintroducing bipartisan legislation called the Safeguarding American Innovation Act, which uses the key findings from our bipartisan PSI investigation and report to protect the research enterprise--in part, through more transparency. First, our bill creates a cross-governmental council at the Office of Management and Budget to coordinate and streamline unauthorized access and grant-making processes between Federal Agencies so that there is greater transparency in where the money is going and how it is being used. Second, the Safeguarding American Innovation Act makes it illegal to lie on a grant application about ties to foreign governments like China. Transparency here will make it clear that researchers are liable for attempting to mislead the government when trying to receive taxpayer funds. Third, our legislation closes loopholes exploited by China and other foreign actors and empowers the State Department to deny visas to foreign researchers aiming to steal U.S. intellectual property and research. Fourth, the Safeguarding American Innovation Act requires research institutions and universities to safeguard against unauthorized access to sensitive technology and to be transparent with the State Department about what technologies a foreign researcher will have access to on campus. Finally, the act requires transparency from our colleges and universities as to what money they are getting from foreign sources. They will have to report any foreign gift of $50,000 or more, and it empowers the Department of Education to fine universities that repeatedly fail to disclose these gifts. Current law requires reporting, but at $250,000. We found that nearly 70 percent of U.S. universities consistently failed to do even that. Lowering the threshold increases transparency, and adding the penalty ensures the schools will report. The American Council on Education has supported our PSI report's recommendation that research institutions should establish a ``know your collaborator'' culture. Greater transparency in our Federal grant-making process, great transparency from our research institutions and universities--these are the steps we need to take to ensure that there is proper accountability in place for the $150 billion that taxpayers entrust with the government for federally funded research every year, while still keeping our fundamental research open and collaborative. The Safeguarding American Innovation Act will shine a light on the Federal grant-making processes and allow us to maintain our world-class lead in innovations, while protecting our investments from foreign theft. Again, I want to thank my colleague Senator Ernst, in particular, for this event today to talk about transparency, and I urge my colleagues to support this important legislation that will provide long overdue transparency in our federally funded research enterprise.

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 on the floor today to talk about workforce training, a critical issue always but particularly now as we get to the point where we are coming out of the COVID-19 crisis, the economy is picking up, and we need more workers in this country. It is a significant issue to be able to help individuals to be able to achieve their God-given potential in life, but also it is really important to our economy because workforce is one of the big challenges we have. So to be able to get good-paying benefits for those workers, it is important but also to help our economy fully recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been over a year now since the pandemic changed all of our lives. In the early weeks and months of that crisis, it looked like things were going to continue to be really tough. I stayed in touch with business owners and workers across my home State of Ohio to hear how they were handling the closures, the layoffs, the other painful side effects of the crisis in those early months. Finally, things are getting better, and we are beginning to see more reopenings. In Ohio, we just learned that people are going to be able to get vaccinations if they are 40 years old or older versus 60 years old and older as of the end of the week. And within another 10 days, everybody 16 years and up will be able to get a vaccine. And we have opened up some wonderful mass vaccination centers. I volunteered at one on Saturday. I spent 5 hours directing people and heard a lot of emotional stories about people really excited about getting back to their families--grandparents being able to see their grandkids for the first time in a year and the opposite, children being able to visit their parents or grandparents for the first time since the COVID-19 crisis hit, and people excited about getting back to work and back to school. So we are going to be able to see this because of Operation Warp Speed and the heroic efforts of our medical researchers and begin to help move our economy forward. In fact, we just found out that the economy added a healthy 379,000 jobs in February. That was encouraging. And more and more businesses, again, are reopening and replacing the signs that said ``Closed Because of COVID'' with signs that now say ``Help Wanted.'' I was at a hearing today, and the representative from the National Association of Manufacturers told us that there are over 500,000 manufacturing jobs that are being offered right now. In other words, there is a shortage of manufacturing skills right now. So that is a good thing in the sense that that means there will be opportunity, but we have to have the skills to be able to fill those jobs. Perhaps most promising, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, called CBO--it is a group around here that gives us advice on the economy--said that even without the most recent spending package, the $1.9 trillion package, that the economy is going to recover to where it was prepandemic by midyear. So by June 30, they think the economy will be back to where it was prepandemic. And we had a good economy then. In February, a year ago, we had the 19th straight month of wage growth of 3 percent or more. We had 3.5 percent unemployment, a 50-year low. We had historically low unemployment for Blacks, Hispanics. We had the lowest poverty rate we had in 60 years. Things are going well, not just for the economy but bringing people out of the sidelines and in to work. But, obviously, the pandemic hit hard. And, now, as the economy begins to recover again, we have to be sure that people have the skills they need to take advantage of a growing economy. The pro-growth policies that we have had along the way, including the tax cuts, tax reform, regulatory relief, had helped to make sure that economy was not just strong but also inclusive. So we have to keep that up as well But just as the biggest challenge pre-COVID, when we had a strong economy, was finding workers with needed skills, we are back there again. So if we want to get back to the kind of economy we all want, the workforce challenge has to be addressed. In fact, again, I think it will be an even bigger challenge now because during COVID-19, there has been a dislocation in the economy. Some jobs have been lost, and people have to find new jobs and develop skills. Some are going to have to leave the hospitality industry, for instance, and they might want to go into the tech sector or go into the manufacturing sector or the healthcare sector. So that ability to shift jobs and develop skills is more important than ever. I am hearing it from employers all over Ohio; that as unemployment continues to fall, there are thousands of job openings for positions like welders and machinists in our manufacturing plants. I mentioned the national figure of 500,000 jobs are available right now, so we are certainly seeing that in Ohio in our factories, medical technicians in hospitals, a lot of interest in techs and in people who are willing to work in healthcare to help others, computer programmers, coders. Almost every sector of the economy is looking for people who have coding skills. So these are the kinds of jobs that economists call the midlevel skills; you know, they need more than a high school degree, for sure, but don't need a college degree. And they actually are jobs that pay quite well with good benefits. So these are the kinds of jobs that we need to be sure that we are providing out there. The supply of skilled workers in that category, students pursuing post-high school certificates in one of these skilled areas, falls way short. They call it the skills gap. And it is holding back our economy from reaching its potential, just as it is holding back individuals from achieving their potential. There was one study from 2019 that found that the skills gap could cause us to miss out on nearly $1.2 trillion of economic output over the next, at that point, 10 years. So, unfortunately, that skills gap hasn't been closed. In fact, again, I think it is more important than ever that we address it. The best option, I think, is to tackle it head-on by getting more people enrolled in these programs that can provide the skills training and equip them with the specialized skills that they need. When people hear the words ``skills training,'' their first thought is often of career and technical education, CTE. There are some great CTE programs around the country. Some in my generation called it vocational education, but this is not your father's Oldsmobile. This is not the same old vocational education; this is high-tech stuff. It is really exciting what is going on. These programs are run by middle schools and by high schools that teach students an incredible variety of skills: health sciences, business management, culinary arts, manufacturing skills. By the way, they are incredibly popular. The good programs are really oversubscribed. One data point that I found interesting said that 92 percent of high school students are taking at least some kind of skills training course from the CTE programs. That doesn't mean 92 percent are enrolled full time in CTE but taking at least some of those courses. I have visited those schools all over Ohio. Again, they are exciting. They are specialized high schools that offer students a more specialized path than the traditional path that many students are encouraged to take, which would be to try to get a 4-year college degree. By the way, again, this path, this specialized path, where you get these skills, leads to no student debt--assuming you could find a way to pay for the skills training, which we will talk about in a second-- and a good job with good pay and good benefits, as opposed to many people who go to college and end up having a lot of debt and not having a degree that enables them to get the kind of job that they want. So it is a great option to do CTE and to get the skills training. I am cofounder and cochair of what we call the Senate CTE Caucus, Career and Technical Education Caucus, with my colleague Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia. And we have worked to strengthen CTE programs, made them more accessible, made them more affordable, provided more Federal help for them. We have gone now from 2 to more than 29 Senators in our CTE Caucus. Our goal is to increase awareness of these CTE programs and the skills training they provide and get students interested in that kind of career training, provide the resources and opportunities that will then provide them what they need for good jobs with good pay. We have also worked together on bipartisan legislation to make sure that the Federal Government is a better partner to States and local communities as they work to ensure these young people have the skills to find good jobs. But CTE at the high school level alone isn't going to solve our workforce needs. Most industry-recognized certificates require more than the CTE training. They require a higher level of training. And CTE programs, as outstanding as they can be, are usually inaccessible to Americans who are no longer of high school age but would stand to benefit greatly from these skills programs. So people who are out of high school, adults, to get that more advanced certificate or to help older learners, the best option is to instead attend a certificate- granting technical workforce training program, the kind offered by your community college or your technical school. These programs are outstanding. At Ohio technical schools, like the Eastland-Fairfield Career Center, the Vantage Community College, the Delaware Area Career Center, Stark State, and others, I have spoken to students in technical programs who tell me how excited they are to put these skills to work. Unfortunately, individuals potentially interested in these programs often cannot afford to make the investment in that education without some financial assistance. I talked to Dr. Para Jones today. She is with Stark State in Summit County, Akron, OH. She told me an interesting story. She said that they have a real need in that area of Ohio, and, frankly, around the country, for truckdrivers. So for people to have the certificate, which is called a CDL--commercial truckdrivers license--they had openings in their courses, but it was $5,000. It cost $5,000 to get a CDL. And even though these students would be making that $5,000 and more in the coming years because truck driving is going to be quite a good career for them--50-, 60-, 70,000 bucks a year, plus benefits, depending on how much they are willing to drive--the 5,000 bucks was just too much of a burden, too high a hurdle So her view is: You guys have to help us to be able to help students get into the programs they want to get into. I remember talking to a welder at a career and technical high school program. It was a woman, 1 of 2 women in a class of 12 people--10 guys, 2 women. She was doing some pretty sophisticated welding, but she said she wanted to take it to the next level; she wanted to be an underwater welder, which pays a lot. We are talking over a hundred thousand bucks a year, easily; yet she couldn't get the skills at the high school level. And when she was offered a Pell grant to go to college, she decided to take that instead, even though she wanted to be a welder. The government couldn't help her go to welding school. And this welding school was expensive. It makes the $5,000 for getting the CDL look like nothing. So it was tens of thousands of dollars to get this advanced certificate. But she was offered the Pell grant to go to college, so she was going to college, even though she would rather be a welder. By the way, these welders are highly sought after by the energy industry and others. So it is one of those examples where, if we could direct some of these Federal resources, not taking it away from colleges or universities but into our training programs, it would make so much sense, particularly for low-income students. And that is how I get to the Pell grants. So Senator Kaine and I have introduced legislation that is called the Jumpstart Our Businesses by Supporting Students Act, or the JOBS Act. So we came up with an acronym so we could end up with the JOBS Act. It makes all the sense in the world. It says that instead of getting a Pell grant that can only be used for going to a college or university, you should be able to get a Pell grant to get one of these shorter-term, industry-recognized certificates. They have to be high- quality, industry recognized. I think it would be much better for the students and certainly much better for the economy. Those are the middle skills that we need so desperately. Yet we are not supporting those students. By the way, of those students who end up going to college with a Pell grant, they say that fewer than half end up getting a college degree in the end. Why? Well, the Pell doesn't pay for your full expenses. There are very few colleges in Ohio where you can use a Pell and get through without having significant additional expenses on top of that. It is tough, and a lot of people drop out to be able to go back to work, as opposed to these career and training programs where, No. 1, you are looking down the tunnel and you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. You have got 10 weeks in this training program. You can get there. And you see at the end of that--to mix my metaphors here, you see the rainbow at the end of that, which is a job, a great job, with good benefits. Plus, the $6,400 from the Pell Program pays for it. For the most part, these programs are fully paid for by the Pell grant. So it is a really good idea. And the JOBS Act is something Senator Tim Kaine and I have introduced before and we are introducing again this week. We want these low-income students to be able to get what they need to be able to get the good jobs, and we want our economy to be able to get those positions filled so that we can continue to grow our economy as a country. By the way, it doesn't mean these students aren't going to go on to a college or university. I was in a CTE program several years ago talking to some students, one of whom was going to a local manufacturer who was a supplier to GE Aviation, which makes aircraft engines. He ended up going--50,000 bucks a year at the time, good benefits--to this manufacturer. He was learning welding and other skills. Well, that company ended up paying for his college later, which I later found out, which is not atypical. So it is a good example of where it doesn't mean you are not going to go to college. Some people will want to, and some people won't. This young man wanted to get an engineering degree, and the company was happy to help him do that to be able to come back to that company and to provide those skills. So whether it is learning how to conduct HVAC installation, how to operate factory machinery, how to program computers, these programs teach students practical, transferrable skills to be able to keep our economy moving. Increasing access to the skills training through the JOBS Act can also serve to lend a helping hand for those who have lost their jobs due to COVID-19. As I said earlier, many jobs have come back and are continuing to come back as we reopen our economy, but we are still down about nine, nine and a half million jobs from before the pandemic. Some are at businesses that are now closed or in industries that have struggled and may be fundamentally changed as a result of the pandemic. In other words, some of these jobs won't come back, so people need to re-up their skills training. Folks who had those jobs, giving them the option to invest in a new skill set through technical education funded by a Pell grant is a ray of hope, a chance for them to get back on their feet, to find new, exciting, good-paying jobs. I am pleased to say the JOBS Act has been endorsed by the National Skills Coalition, the Association for Career and Technical Education, the Association of Community College Trustees--in fact, last year, it was their No. 1 priority, among the community colleges--the American Association of Community Colleges, and other groups. The reason the JOBS Act has this kind of strong support is it is the best proposal out there that will help fill the skills gap we have right now. It will cover programs that, at a minimum, require 150 hours and 8 weeks to complete. Alternative proposals severely limit the programs by requiring them to have too many hours, 320 hours. Ohio community colleges have told me none of their short-term training programs would qualify under that higher number of hour requirement. Programs like welding, precision machining, and electrical trades--we need the JOBS Act now. As we work to get our economy back up to speed, passing the JOBS Act is a top priority for Senator Kaine, for myself, and for other Members on both sides of the aisle. Let's be sure that we work together to get this legislations across the finish line. It just makes too much sense. It is going to help tens of thousands of people have better opportunities. It is going to help our economy fill the critical jobs it needs to recover. We need to seize this opportunity, seize it now, get this economy back on track, and ensure Ohioans and all Americans have this opportunity to develop the skills to grow in the career of their choice and fulfill their potential in life. I yield back.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am here on the floor today to talk about the unfolding, urgent situation on our southern border, and I do so as the ranking Republican on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. This unfortunate situation at the border includes a lot of kids coming over the border, UACs, as they call them, unaccompanied alien children. These children are making a long and dangerous journey north, putting themselves at risk and bringing our immigration system and our shelter system along the border to a breaking point. You may have heard that the Biden administration insists this is not a crisis. Here are the facts. You decide. This chart shows the dire situation that we are in. On Tuesday, the most recent confirmed information we have is there were 3,400 of these children in Border Patrol custody. Ten days ago, that number was 1,700. So in 10 days, this number has doubled. To put this in perspective, at the very height of the border crisis in 2019 that we all remember being talked about a lot on the floor of this Senate and around the country, families and children were coming in, in big numbers. At the very height, it was 2,600 unaccompanied kids. Today, based on some information we just received anecdotally from the Customs and Border Protection folks, it is over 3,500. It is a 35-percent increase even from where it was during the crisis, and it is growing. Under law, these children have to be transferred to the Federal Department of Health and Human Services, HHS, within 72 hours of their being apprehended, and why we had that law in place was to be able to help these kids. So instead of being in a Border Patrol detention facility, which, by the way, were all designed for single males--they don't have any separation, don't have any trained people to help provide care to children, and it is law enforcement, Border Patrol agents--but within 72 hours, we had said that you have to transfer these children to a Health and Human Services facility that is appropriate for children. How is that working? Again, as of Tuesday, there were 3,400 of these kids in Border Patrol custody in the wrong kind of detention facilities for children. There were 2,800 children who were ready to transfer to HHS. In other words, they had been screened, gone through a process. As of Tuesday, there were 500 beds available, meaning 2,300 children are remaining in Border Patrol custody in overcrowded, adult facilities without proper care because there is nowhere to take them. Look, it is a bad situation. HHS contractors are supposed to be trained to care for the kids. The Border Patrol agents are not trained for that. They are doing their best, but it is not a safe situation for the kids. By the way, nobody in Border Patrol believes it is a good situation for the kids. These facilities, the Border Patrol facilities at the Border Patrol stations and HHS facilities are all at a breaking point. They are busting at the seams. Is that a crisis? I don't know. You decide. This influx comes, by the way, during a season when you normally don't have a lot of people coming over the border. This is in the winter. Normally, in the spring and then in the fall, you see the biggest influxes of families, kids, individuals. So we expect these numbers to get a lot worse. We expect it to get a lot worse into the spring. By the way, we spoke to Customs and Border Patrol folks today. They told us the numbers are up again today. In fact, we have some internal document from the Department of Homeland Security that a media organization reported on. It is an official document that says DHS, themselves, predict there will be 117,000 children who will be placed in this situation this year. So they know it just is growing. Again, is it a crisis? You decide. It is certainly a dangerous situation. By all accounts, many of these migrants, including children, face serious threats to their lives and well-being on the trip north. Just as happened in the past surges in 2014 and 2019, we know this includes many victims of human trafficking who are deceived and coerced by traffickers and smugglers as they are taken from Central America up to the U.S. border. The trip is treacherous. We have evidence that exploitation and sexual abuse occurs along the way. In 2019, again, the last time this happened, estimates of migrants who were victims of sexual or physical abuse along the journey ranged from 30 to 75 percent. Individual victims have described incredibly disturbing accounts of being subjected to violence, sexual assault, rape by traffickers and other criminals. It is a bad situation. By the way, this situation is the direct result of policy changes. The new administration came in determined to dismantle all of what the previous administration had done to try to disincentivize people from coming to the border, and they have been effective in doing that. They have dismantled the immigration practices and proceedings that were working to reduce these incentives. It had resulted in very few kids coming to the border, as an example--almost none. Last week, the Secretary of Homeland Security said in a press conference that the surge of unaccompanied kids is a ``challenge'' but not a ``crisis.'' He then deflected blame to the previous administration. That is fine. Look, I wish it were just a challenge that didn't require an urgent response, but that is not the reality along the border today. I, frankly, don't care what we call it. Call it a difficult situation, a challenge, whatever you want, but I care a lot about what we do in response. There is an old saying that says Washington only responds to a crisis. I think, unfortunately, there is a lot of truth to that. We have to respond here. We have to do something. That is why I think we need to consider this dire situation a crisis before it gets much worse. The next chart shows the reality, which is this surge happened almost immediately after President Biden and his administration were sworn in and they made these announcements about changes in policy. Here we have the election. Here we have the swearing-in. Look at this huge surge in both family units and in these kids. As I said, we have twice as many kids today as we had 10 days ago. This is surging up. Nearly 10,000 unaccompanied alien children and twice as many family members crossed our border in February, and that is the shortest month of the year. These surges stopped under the previous administration because they put in place policies that reduce the incentives for individuals, families, and unaccompanied minors to try to unlawfully enter the United States. In less than 2 months, the Biden administration has systemically taken away these tools that were being used to reduce these incentives. On day one, the new administration revoked the emergency declaration for the border, stopped construction of the border fence, and placed a 100-day halt to deportations. Not surprisingly, this gave traffickers the green light to exploit the situation, and more people and more drugs are now moving across the border. Next, the new administration reversed what is known as the Migrant Protection Protocols or the ``Remain in Mexico'' policy, which required asylum seekers to wait in Mexico rather than being released in communities around the United States while waiting for their asylum claims to be adjudicated. About 20 percent of the asylum seekers who went through the entire application process, including all of the hearings, were granted asylum in 2018. So, if you go through all of the process, about 20 percent of those individuals actually got asylum. Now, that is a self-selected group because I know not everybody goes to the hearing. In fact, the best data show that most don't show up for all of the hearings. The long- term data show that about half of all asylum applicants eventually get removal orders due to their not attending all of their asylum hearings. We don't have great data on this, to be honest, and some people say that very few go to these asylum hearings. Some say more do. The point is that about half of them are getting removal orders--we know that-- for not attending all of their asylum hearings. Given that there is a 1.2 million-case backlog in America today for asylum applicants and that there were fewer than 5,000 noncriminals deported last year by ICE, that tells us that, under the current system, if you are a noncriminal asylum seeker who is denied asylum and is subject to one of these removal orders, it is highly unlikely that you are going to actually end up being deported from the United States. Asylum seekers know that. So do the traffickers. It is no wonder there has been a surge of those who want to live in the United States who have come to the border and sought asylum in recent years. I went to the border in 2019, and many of my colleagues have been down to the border to see this situation. I will be going back again soon to see firsthand what is happening and to see how we can help. It should not be a partisan issue. It should be one in which Democrats and Republicans alike see what is happening--see the tragedy unfolding along the border--and do something to address it. This Migrant Protection Program put in place by the Trump administration had resulted in a sharp reduction in the surge of asylum claims as people realized, pending their asylum hearings, they were not going to be released in U.S. communities. Now we are seeing the reverse happen. Second, the Biden administration actually suspended Safe Third Country agreements with the Governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, which allowed migrants to apply for asylum in the first foreign country they crossed into. This, of course, reduced incentives for migrants from those countries to make the long, arduous, and dangerous journey to the southern border. These agreements were in the process of being fully implemented, but they were already helping and had the potential of finding a much more expeditious way to identify and process those who would qualify for legitimate asylum-refugee status before they would come all the way to our border. All that work that has been accomplished has now been lost. I urge the administration to reinstate those Safe Third Country agreements with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Third, the new administration has also significantly changed the way we process migrants during the COVID-19 crisis. Instead of establishing the practice of turning away most immigrant and nonimmigrant visa holders to protect the health and safety of the American people, we are now learning from media reports, including the Washington Post, that this new administration has made an unofficial exception to the COVID- 19 rules for children and for families. Border Patrol agents and CBP officers who are on the frontlines are telling us that they are returning to the pre-COVID practice of bringing people into the country despite the health crisis that all of us understand. The reports are that either the CBP officers are not testing kids and families for COVID at all or, if they are, they are still releasing some of those who test positive to shelters or into the United States with a request that they quarantine after they travel to their final destinations in the interior of the United States. In fact, we know of one instance in which more than 100 unlawful immigrants in Brownsville, TX, who tested positive for COVID-19, were simply told to quarantine when they reached their final destinations regardless of how many people they interacted with when taking a bus--in that case, most were taking a bus, apparently--or when taking a plane to their destinations. Obviously, that doesn't make any sense. The final policy changes that encourage illegal entry is the new administration's advocating for amnesty for those here illegally without making it clear that such amnesty would not apply to anyone not already here. That is important. As the experience of the last amnesty in 1986 demonstrated, unless it is very clear that illegal entry won't be rewarded, it will spawn more illegal entries. Now, let's face it. The traffickers and the smugglers are going to take advantage of this, and they are going to misrepresent the reality, but, still, it is important that all of us as policymakers make it very clear, as we talk about amnesty, that it is not as to the people who might come in the future; it is as to the people who are already here. I will say that the State Department has announced that it will be reinstating the Central American Minors Program, which was a streamlined refugee process that existed under the Obama administration and was run by the U.S. Government and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, but it was discontinued under the Trump administration. I think it is a positive thing that they are reinstating that. We don't have all of the details yet, but I will tell you that standing up this program without incentivizing people to use it is not going to be very effective. Even if it were to be as effective as it was at the height of the program, which was during the Obama administration, it would not be nearly enough people. In 2 years, the program resettled 3,300 individuals. So 3,300 children were resettled in 2 years. That is not going to make a real impact when we are receiving, right now, 3,300 children every couple of weeks at the border. Again, I hope they do reinstate that program, as I think that would be positive, but they have to do much more in order to avoid this tragic situation from continuing and getting much worse. The decision by the new administration to change all of these policies, which were working, without having viable alternatives is causing this chaos. It was done without thinking through the real safety and security concerns for both communities and citizens of the United States as well as for these unaccompanied kids and their families. As a result, we have a surge of people being incentivized to enter our country unlawfully, and our systems are being strained during a public health emergency. This influx is even worse than in 2019, not just because the numbers are greater but because we now have the COVID-19 pandemic, and children and families are being forced into tight quarters in detention facilities. Asylum seekers with COVID-19 are being released into our communities, and Customs and Border Protection officers who haven't been able to receive the vaccine yet, which is a problem, are being exposed to this influx of migrants who haven't been tested. So it is an even bigger problem--forgetting the numbers--given the situation we are in. That ties in another concern I have about the way this crisis has been handled so far, which is the administration's response to the overcrowding at the shelter facilities. It has been to rush and potentially cut corners to place these unaccompanied children with sponsors because their goal, after HHS detention in HHS facilities, is to get these children out to sponsor families. The standards of due diligence that are required to ensure these children are not being placed in danger are not being met, as far as we can tell, which continues a troubling trend that goes back years and administrations. It is an issue I have worked on since 2015, when we had a terrible situation in my home State of Ohio wherein kids were given back to the traffickers by HHS--the traffickers who had brought them up from Central America by lying to their parents about what they were going to do: take them to school and so on. These kids ended up working on an egg farm, 6 to 7 days a week, below the minimum wage. I have seen this. I have seen what happens when HHS does not take its time and do it right, and it is very difficult for HHS to do that with the surge that it has. Over the course of three bipartisan reports and hearings as part of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which I chair, and across two different administrations, we found failures to ensure the safety of or to even keep track of these vulnerable children once they were handed off to sponsors as well as a fundamental refusal by Agencies to accept that they were responsible for the welfare of these kids. That is the reality. Our bipartisan investigations also found that the Office of Refugee Resettlement failed to exercise appropriate oversight at its facilities and wasted millions of taxpayer dollars on organizations and on contractors that could not acquire State licenses to safely open the planned shelter facilities. As those in this administration attempt to process this influx of unaccompanied kids and safely get them to longer term housing solutions, it is urgent that they do the due diligence on who is going to be looking after these children and not cut corners as some reports are indicating. That means fingerprinting the sponsors. That means background checks. That means home visits. The Federal Government cannot allow these kids to fall victim to human trafficking, to abuse, or other harm. I, along with my bipartisan cosponsors, will be reintroducing the Responsibility for Unaccompanied Minors Act again in the coming days to help ensure these requirements are met to protect our kids. Here is the reality: Once these children arrive at the border, there are no good options. The answer is to stop providing the incentives, the pull factor. That is the short-term imperative. We should not be encouraging these young people to make that arduous journey to then have them end up in a detention facility. That is wrong for them. It is a place where single males are crowded together but where kids are not taken care of. Then, when they have to go to the HHS facility, there is not enough room--again, making the point of there being 3,400 kids in detention and 2,800 kids who are ready to be transferred to HHS, to more appropriate facilities, but there are only 500 beds. So 2,300 are kept in these overcrowded facilities that are meant for single males. It is not a good option. There is no good option. The option is to keep them from coming up to the border in the first place. Yes, we can do more on the push factors also. That means investing in Central America and other places to try to make those countries places where people would want to stay rather than come to the United States. Yet, my colleagues, that is what is called a long-term solution. Let's be frank. I am for it, but we have to recognize that this is not a solution to the current crisis that we face. In the last 5 years, we have spent $3.6 billion of U.S. taxpayer funds in aid for these Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. President Biden is proposing to spend another $4 billion in those countries. I support smart investments that don't get wasted because of corruption or other challenges, but it won't fix the crisis this month, this year, or next year. The development of the Northern Triangle is a decades-long effort--one we need to do but one that is not going to address, again, the crisis that we face now. I urge the Biden administration to also step up efforts to tie any aid to better collaboration with our international partners, including with the Governments of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, to address this challenge, discourage migration, and provide alternatives to those seeking to make the dangerous journey north. They need to help us, and they have in the past. In the Trump administration, we had a valuable partner in Mexico, as an example. It used tens of thousands of its own military to patrol its own southern border to ensure migrants could be processed, if necessary, and turned away if they didn't meet the requirements. That was very helpful. I am concerned that these troops have now been pulled back--that is the information that we are receiving--partly because, as we are told, President Biden is not encouraging the current Mexican leadership to continue this practice. I hope that changes. The current surge in unaccompanied children at our border, in the midst of a global pandemic, is a situation in which no one wins and the children lose the most. I am disappointed that the Biden administration chose to overturn the policies put in place by the Trump administration, which were to help control the flow of migrants during this pandemic, without having any viable alternatives. I am concerned that leaders at key Agencies involved in the response to this crisis are somehow seeing it as in their interests to downplay the severity of the situation. I urge the Biden administration to change course. Put back in place smart policies that reduce the pull factors, and address the need for legal and orderly processes for migration. I yield the floor.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 1092 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, No. 1, the 4-week average on unemployment claims are actually going the right way. Why? Because the economy is opening up, folks. If you don't see that, you are not going home to your States and talking to your employers. Second, we have a situation here where the Republicans are saying we want to continue the $300 per month--or per week after March 15, but let's end it on July 18. If things turn south--which no one is predicting, by the way, not a single economist--I know a lot of us would be willing to work with the other side of the aisle to extend, but there is no reason to do that at this point. With regard to your tax cut, it is a tax increase. It is a tax increase on small businesses. Vote on Amendment No. 1378

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, everybody around here agrees that the U.S. economy is getting better--there is no argument about that--and that workers are needed. Yet, in this massive partisan spending bill, a lot of which is not even about COVID-19, the Democrats are insisting on a substantial increase to the already extraordinary Federal Government add-on to State unemployment payments, making it harder to get people who can go back to work. Just this morning, we learned that the economy added 379,000 jobs in February and that the unemployment rate dropped to 6.2 percent. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the consensus of economists is that unemployment will continue to trend lower. It underscores what the CBO has said recently, which is that, without any additional stimulus, the economy will recover to prepandemic levels by midyear, this year--that is June 30--not in September as the Democrats' approach would suggest. Look at your own States. Employers are looking to hire people. ``Help wanted'' signs are up. As the economy starts to improve, we want to get people back to work. Adding to the good news, President Biden now tells us that vaccines will be available by the end of May for all who will want them. That will further kick-start the economy. Despite the better news, as we understand it, the Democrats' approach actually extends the generous Federal supplement currently in place until September 6--by the way, even a little beyond what is in the $1.9 trillion underlying bill. I was just told that it has a $31 billion tax increase that affects the so-called passthrough, which is primarily small businesses, to pay for a proposal to pay people more who are on unemployment insurance. The Democrats' proposal makes it even more advantageous to be on unemployment by changing retroactively a longstanding policy that says UI benefits are taxed as income. You make up to 10,000 bucks in benefits, tax-free, even if you have made up to $150,000 a year. Remember, with that 600 bucks a week Federal supplement, which is what it was for a lot of last year when this would have applied, about 70 percent of workers on UI made more than they would have at their jobs. Even at 300 bucks a week, 42 percent of workers are making more on UI than they would make at their jobs. Of the essential workers, think of the truckdrivers who are making 25 bucks an hour. They are being told ``you have to pay your taxes,'' but those who aren't working not only get the UI benefits, but now, for the first time ever, some of that income is actually going to be tax-free. So you have to pay your taxes, but they don't. That is not fair. The underlying bill and the Democrats' alternative are going to hurt the effort to get people back to work. Our amendment would extend UI benefits in a responsible manner at the current low level of $300 per week through July 18. According to the CBO, this will save over $90 billion in outlays and actually raise $600 million in revenue. Why? Because people will be working. That is a good thing. We should want that. I urge my colleagues to oppose unnecessarily lengthening the time of the Federal UI supplement that would make it even more advantageous to be on unemployment and would slow the job creation we all want. Our amendment strikes the right balance. It helps those who truly need it, promotes better stewardship of our taxpayer dollars, and encourages those who can return to work to do so. I urge its adoption. (Applause.)

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 15 seconds to respond, and then I will stop.

Mr. PORTMAN. I ask unanimous consent that there be 6 minutes of debate equally divided.

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President.

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, let's be clear with what is going on here. The Republicans have offered a very generous unemployment system, including 300 bucks per week, as is the current law after March 15, when it would otherwise expire, and taking it to July 18. Now, there is nobody in this Chamber that doesn't see that the economy is improving. And the Congressional Budget Office, which is a nonpartisan group here, has told us that, actually, by the middle of this year, we are going to be back to the prepandemic level in terms of our economy. Every economist looks at this and says that unemployment is going down. I note that my colleague over there, from Oregon, said that claims were higher last week in terms of unemployment. The 4-week average is actually down, considerably. Let me tell you what happened today, because I just looked it up. New York opened its movie theaters; Virginia announced they are opening their schools; West Virginia opened their bars, their restaurants, all businesses; Connecticut is opening indoor dining. This is happening every day. The economy is getting better. And everybody says--including, by the way, Larry Summers, a famous Democratic economist, who was Treasury Secretary under President Obama--that when you look at what happens with regard to unemployment insurance, if it is too high, it is a disincentive to work. I don't think Larry Summers is saying people are lazy. I think what Larry Summers is saying is that you want to have a system that is balanced, where you are encouraging people to work. There are so many employers in our States who are looking for people right now, and that is going to continue to happen as we open up more. Look, our unemployment provision is very reasonable; it is very generous--taking it through July 18. They are taking theirs through September 6. And then they are adding this new element that has never been in unemployment before, where suddenly if you are on unemployment insurance, you don't have to pay taxes, but if you are working you do have to pay taxes. How does that make sense? Don't we want to encourage people to work? I think we do. I hope that my colleagues will vote down this amendment and continue to keep the Portman amendment in place, which, by the way, passed this Chamber only about an hour and a half ago.

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, this amendment comes after about 24 hours of discussion here as a surprise because we are just looking at it for the first time. But there are two things that are very disturbing about it. One is it completely distorts workers' compensation for Federal employees, which has substantially increased costs to taxpayers, of course. It also sets a terrible precedent in terms of how workers' comp works. Workers' comp, of course, is for people who are injured on the job, and you have to show you have been injured on the job. That is how it works. It is a basic principle for workers' comp. In this case, this amendment changes the rules to require compensation for COVID-19 lost wages no matter how risky the Federal employees' behavior might have been outside of the workplace. In other words, no questions asked. If you are a Federal worker and you get COVID-19, you get this. That is not the way workers' comp works. So this is a big change in workforce policy and establishes, again, a dangerous new precedent in workers' comp policy, generally. It also creates a wrong incentive--think about it--for the employee and for the employer. So we oppose this. For Federal workers, the statute is very explicit. It says: Federal workers' compensation ``for the disability or death . . . resulting from personal injury sustained while in the performance of . . . duty.'' Second--I ask unanimous consent for an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. PORTMAN. Second, we are just finding out there is another $10 billion added through this amendment to State and local governments. I don't know if everybody was listening when Senator Romney gave his explanation during his amendment of what is happening with regard to our States, but a lot of our States don't need the money. Some do and some don't. And there is no requirements here that if you have got a surplus or if you otherwise don't have COVID-19 expenses that you don't get the money, and yet we are adding another $10 billion to that pot through this one amendment. So, of course, we object to this amendment, and there may be other stuff in there too. I hope everybody gets a chance to look at it because we have not had a chance to do so yet. But I hope we do not create the wrong incentives. I hope we do not create this situation where we are substantially increasing costs to the taxpayer through changes in workers' comp and adding another $10 billion to a category where it has been shown, in many cases, not to be needed.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I worked with my colleague from Pennsylvania on some of these home care options, and I think it is a very positive thing. In fact, it saves a lot of cost for the system, but the question is, What is it doing in a COVID relief bill? You know, I just have to say, having been involved in a bipartisan way on five different COVID relief packages over the last year, I am just so discouraged that we can't sit down, Republicans and Democrats alike, and work out a targeted, focused bill on COVID, and, by the way, then move on to other things, including healthcare reform, including issues that traditionally have also been bipartisan, like infrastructure and broadband expansion, like retirement security or dealing with China and supply chain issues. But this is not the way to start. We are looking at a $1.9 trillion package, the second largest ever written by Congress. The first one went through last year. And there was no input--virtually no input-- from anybody on our side of the aisle because the administration decided they didn't want it. They wanted to jam this thing through without our participation. And it is too bad, because they will end up with a product that is not going to be as focused and targeted, but, also, it is just getting off on the wrong foot and making it more difficult for us to figure out how to come together on other issues. It is really the opposite. This process is really the opposite of what President Biden talked about. He talked about it in his campaign. I mean, he won a campaign, including in his primary, saying he wanted to work across the aisle; he wanted to change the tone in Washington. That was pretty brave of him to say, really. And, then, in his inaugural address, he did the same thing; didn't he? He talked about the need for unity. He talked about wanting to get people together and to work with Democrats and Republicans alike and kind of get back to that. This is exactly the opposite of that. I just don't get it. I have to tell you, I am mystified why they want to start off this way. I was one of the 10 Republicans who went down to the White House to meet with President Biden about this a few weeks ago, and we offered our own proposal and said we would like to work with you and negotiate with you. And, you know, there has been no interest, to be honest, and I wish it weren't the case. And $4 trillion has already been allocated to the COVID-19 issue, and it was needed. It is a crisis. It still is. It is not over yet, although things are getting a lot better, both in terms of the healthcare crisis and in terms of the economy. But we did that, again, five different times--over $4 trillion, five different times in a bipartisan way. So we know we can do it. It is hard for us to do it on other issues-- let's face it--like taxes or even healthcare, but it is not with regard to COVID-19. At least it hasn't been until now. The most recent $900 billion COVID relief package passed at the end of December by a 92 to 6 vote--92 to 6. I came out to the floor to give speeches on this Senate floor over 20 times in the months prior to that legislation finally being passed, urging Congress to come out of our partisan corners, Democrats and Republicans alike, and to come up with a COVID relief package, because I saw so much middle ground. And we found it by the end of December. I was part of a group of five Democrats and five Republicans who sat down over a month-long period or so. We actually wrote a bill. The ``908 Coalition,'' we called ourselves because we wrote a bill for $900 billion that was the basis for that $900 billion legislation that eventually passed. So I have been there. I have done it. We have done it. We can do it. Yet we are looking here at an entirely different process and, unfortunately, a product that is not targeted, not focused. It is interesting to note that of the $900 billion that we appropriated just a couple of months ago, at the end of the year, more than half of that, we are told, has not been spent yet. So while we are starting a $1.9 trillion new spending project, about half of what we just did has yet to be spent. So how do we know how much is needed? It is very hard to know. I will say that it is troubling to me that this bill is loaded up with provisions that don't relate to addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, because we should be targeted and focused like a laser on that issue and not on other things. In fact, when you look at the healthcare part of this, most people would think: OK, what would you do with a COVID-19 bill? You would focus on the coronavirus. You would focus on the testing and the tracing. You would focus on the vaccine development and distribution. You would focus on the healthcare side, including healthcare providers. Unfortunately, that is a very small part of the funding of this bill. It is $160 billion out of $1.9 trillion, so less than 10 percent of the bill is focused on that. And, by the way, the alternative I mentioned that we offered to President Biden--$160 billion. We totally believe in that part of the bill, and that we should put all of that in there, particularly with regard to the vaccines. So it is frustrating because not only is the process not what we have done in the past and is best for this country, but also the substance of this bill is just not targeted on COVID-19. How do I tell hard- working families in my State of Ohio that there is a provision in the bill that asks Medicare to spend more money in New Jersey, Delaware, and Rhode Island but not in Ohio and other States? How do I explain that we need to set aside hundreds of millions of dollars that are in this bill in additional Federal funds for the arts? We can have that debate on the arts, but it has nothing to do with COVID-19. We have the highest deficit, as a share of GDP, since World War II--the highest debt as a share of GDP. You know, I don't think we should be spending that kind of money on things that don't relate to COVID-19. Beyond these kinds of unrelated provisions, there are also proposals in this stimulus that are directed at important issues, but, based on what is needed to respond to the current challenges, are simply unnecessary and add up to more wasteful spending. For example, we reached a point in this pandemic where the CDC, or the Centers for Disease Control, has said that schools can start to open safely with the right measures in place--thank goodness. We want to get our kids back to school. That should be a cause for celebration. But the plan here, the $1.9 trillion, doesn't reflect those findings. Last year, we appropriated $113 billion for schools to help navigate the pandemic, but, as of now, of that $113 billion, only $15 billion has been spent. So, roughly, $100 billion is left over from last year with regard to schools. If we are already opening classes safely with that amount, why does this $1.9 trillion plan instead call for an additional investment of $130 billion in our schools, but especially when we are told that most of that $130 billion will not be spent in this calendar year? Nobody thinks that next year, at this time, we are going to have the crisis we have now, and yet the $130 billion of new money will not be spent until the end of 2028. By the way, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that about half of the funds in the entire proposal won't even be spent in this calendar year. That is their analysis--objective, nonpartisan. No one expects, again, that we will be in this crisis at that time. So it just doesn't seem to make sense to me. There are other provisions in this bill that seem to actually take solutions we have come up with in the past COVID-19 package and make them worse. Unemployment insurance is a good example. Republicans and Democrats alike believe there needs to be some expanded help in terms of those who have been hit hardest by the pandemic and have lost a job, and the last bipartisan spending agreement reflected that consensus. But now, after finally reaching an agreement on expanded unemployment insurance, one that got people the help they need without creating a disincentive to work, Democrats want to jam through another UI proposal that increases the $300 per week that we just agreed to in December to $400 a week. Now, again, that is in the context of the healthcare crisis getting better and the economy getting better and the unemployment numbers going down that we are going to put more into unemployment insurance. That creates a problem because it will mean if you go up to $400 a week, then more than half of the workers on unemployment insurance will be earning more on unemployment than they would staying employed. We want to get people back to work. That is what we all should want, at least. So why would you do that? We shouldn't want that. It is going to result in fewer people getting to work as unemployment continues to go down, as the vaccines are more widely available. That is the opposite of what we should want. At the same time, a new provision in this bill would allow employees who are Federal employees to take 600 hours of taxpayer-funded emergency leave this fiscal year. To put that in perspective, 600 hours is about half of the total number of working hours remaining in this fiscal year. There are plenty of problems with the way this plan is written. To give you one example, a Federal employee with children in school would be eligible for this leave program as long as the school is offering a remote learning option, even if the kids are going to the classroom every day for in-person learning. Federal employees would also be eligible for this leave if they are feeling unwell, even if they don't have COVID-19, and with no oversight, no doctor's note, and no supervisory approval. This is far beyond the responsible bipartisan family leave proposal we did include, because we should have, in the Family First Coronavirus Response Act, which offered 80 hours of sick leave, about one-seventh of the time off in this new proposal, and which applies to millions of private and public sector employees, in addition to the Federal employees who are only covered by this new proposal. When none of us knew exactly how long we would be faced with the COVID-19 crisis, we decided, on a bipartisan basis, that 80 hours was sufficient. But now that we have this new proposal, at seven times that leave with no test necessary, it is at a time when we are actually turning the tide on this virus, and we all acknowledge that. When more of us are being tested and vaccinated, our numbers are going down-- thank goodness--and we have a much better understanding of the dangers of COVID-19. So why does this make sense? Furthermore, Federal jobs are pretty secure. Why should taxpayers pay for Federal employees to get 600 hours of leave when private sector employees are suffering more job losses than the public sector? It hardly seems like a good use of taxpayer dollars. It is also disappointing in this bill, which all of us are expected to vote on here in the coming days, because the end result is so different than the last five. As I said, the last five times, we put it together in a bipartisan basis. The process has been frustrating, and I know many colleagues who were part of the group of five Republicans and five Democrats agree with that. We are, in effect, for the sake of expediency and partisan victory, forgetting about thoughtful policy and bipartisanship. We have to show that we have enough Republicans to work with Democrats to get this done. I understand that. That is why 10 of us went down to the White House, because along with 50 Democrats, that would be 60, which is the magic number needed. But there is more than 10 Republicans who want to work with Democrats. There have been every time we have taken this up over the past year. We proposed the $618 billion counterproposal that shares a lot of common ground with the Biden plan--not $1.9 trillion but $618 billion. Again, we take care of all the healthcare response to the virus. This is in the Biden plan. We have a similar approach on stimulus checks: Make it a little more targeted, which everyone, I think, agrees is a good idea. Again, with regard to schools, we don't waste the money, which we talked about earlier, but we would be focused on getting kids back to school. The main difference in our bill is we take a more targeted approach to address the most urgent healthcare and economic needs. We heed the advice of prominent Democratic economist Larry Summers and so many others who have now said that the $1.9 trillion Biden stimulus is not just wasting taxpayer money; it risks overheating an already recovering economy, leading to higher inflation, hurting middle-class families, and threatening long-term growth. But rather than the counterproposal leading to this productive type of bipartisan negotiations we had last year, this time we have been told Democrats want to go it alone. We will keep talking to the President's people. We will keep talking to Democrats in Congress, hoping they will follow through on the campaign message and the inaugural promise because that is what we should be doing as a Congress, not just on this issue but so many other issues as well. We shouldn't be going it alone. Reconciliation has allowed Democrats to take what is essentially a ``my way or the highway'' approach to a response package that would be among the most expensive pieces of legislation in our country's history. As a result, dozens of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle are being shut out of providing their input on this bill, and we are going to be left with a partisan bill that fails to meet the most urgent and pressing needs. In fact, because all of these unrelated spending measures we talked about and others are directed toward traditional Democratic constituencies, I would argue that this bill has not just been my way or the highway, but it has been my way and the highway. The bottom line is, at the end of the road of this reconciliation process, we will have a bill that underdelivers in many respects and is overpriced, and that is sad to me. It didn't have to be this way. Again, we have done it before five times together, made it inclusive, listened to each other to come up with a bipartisan result. Let's put a stop to this runaway train that is going to add to the deficit unnecessarily and put a damper on the prospects for the bipartisanship promised by this new administration. Wanting to heal the wounds is something all of us should want. Wanting to work together is something all of us should want. Getting back to an era where we actually sit down, debate things, work them out, and help bring the country together is something all of us should want. I agree with what President Biden said in his campaign and the inaugural address about the need for unity. Let's do it. Let's not have rhetoric; let's have action. We can work together to get this done. We won't get there if we continue to operate like this. It hurts not just our new President and his hopes for getting things done; it hurts the country and the ability for us to continue to work together to deal with this crisis and get back to a more normal life. I yield back my time.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am here on the floor today to talk about the need for all of us to redouble our efforts to combat drug addiction. One of the top priorities I have had in my time in public service has been to combat this crisis, which has devastated so many families, destroyed so many communities, and impacted us in so many negative ways. Unfortunately, under the cover of the coronavirus pandemic, there is an epidemic that is growing, and that is the drug addiction epidemic. It is heartbreaking because we actually had several years of progress. We were making progress, finally, in turning the tide, and now, it is coming back with a vengeance to the point that overdoses and overdose deaths, hospitalizations, and all the other negative consequences of drug addiction is being raised up again in the context of the coronavirus. Here, in the Congress, we have taken a leadership role on addressing this issue. Over the last several years, Congress has appropriated billions of dollars--and not that money solves everything, but the money has been pretty well spent on programs that are actually tested, evidence-based programs on prevention, on treatment, and longer term recovery. Once called the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, which I authored with my colleague, Sheldon Whitehouse, on the other side of the aisle, there is other legislation, too, called the 21st Century Cures Act. All of this has provided help that goes down to the local level, the community level, to be able to create a network, to be able to push back against the addiction crisis. In 2017, Ohio's overdose opioid death rate was almost three times the national average. Ohio was one of the worst States in the country in terms of our opioid addiction. In terms of opioid deaths, we were top three in the country. It is not something you want to be at the top of. Nearly a dozen Ohioans were dying from these dangerous drugs every single day. This is in 2017. It surpassed car crashes as our country's No. 1 killer among young people and, for Ohio, the No. 1 overall. But that next year, in 2018, much of what we were doing here in Congress, the work again on the CARA Act, the Cures Act, and other things that were being done at the State level and local level that were being supported by our Federal legislation, they were starting to work. So, in 2018, Ohio led the country again, but this time it wasn't in overdose deaths. It was in the reduction of overdose deaths. We actually had a 22-percent reduction from 2017 to 2018. By the way, the same thing happened nationally. We had a reduction in overdose deaths nationally in 2018 for the first time since 1990. Think about that. From 1990 until 2018, every single year, we had more people dying from overdoses in this country, driven in large part by opioids, and, more recently, by the most deadly of opioids, synthetic opioids like fentanyl and Carfentanil. Unfortunately, again, under the cover of this coronavirus pandemic, drug addiction has flourished, and that positive progress has been reversed. It is heartbreaking. While we need to remain committed to solving the healthcare challenges of COVID-19, there is increasing evidence that the stresses of this unprecedented time are driving a spike in drug abuse and subsequent overdoses, this making 2020 the worst year in the history of our country in terms of overdose deaths and other measurements of drug addiction. Why? Well, I have asked a lot of people that. Common sense would tell you people are lonelier. Many people are distraught. Maybe they have lost their job. Maybe they have had someone in their family die of COVID-19. People are feeling anxious. People are unable to access recovery programs in person, so they can't go sit down with their recovery coach, which they might have been able to do but for COVID-19 and the isolation that is required. Many of those in recovery from addiction are stalled in their progress, or they are suffering from relapses. There is a story that ran last week about a record number of overdose deaths in my home State of Ohio. It was on FOX 8 in Cleveland. One of the people they interviewed was a Cleveland woman who had lost her son to an overdose. It was pretty powerful. She talked about how important it is for people fighting addiction to have that network of support. It was hard to find during COVID-19. She said: ``An addict needs to talk to someone, they need constant reassuring from their support group.'' She is right. There are a lot of troubling statistics out there that should be a cause for concern and a call to action for all of us. The Centers for Disease Control reported that more than 81,000 people died of drug overdoses in the 12 months ending in May 20 of 2020, the highest 12-month total in our Nation's history. So, again, it looks like 2020 is going to be the worst year ever. The American Medical Association reports that more than 40 States have reported an increase in opioid-related deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic. A recent study in the JAMA Psychiatry journal found that a 45-percent increase was the overdose death increase in emergency rooms from April to October of 2020 compared to that same time in 2019. It would be worse, in my view, without the Federal response to the coronavirus pandemic, including some measures to ensure those suffering from addiction can continue to get the care they need through telehealth. We have cut redtape. We have provided some regulatory relief to expand telehealth and telehealth options specifically for opioid treatment, like eliminating requirements for in-person visits before prescribing lifesaving drugs like buprenorphine. Without these expanded services, I believe the overdose spike would be even worse. Although there is no substitute for face-to-face interaction to help along an individual's journey to recovery, telehealth has kept patients in touch with their doctors at least and allowed physicians to prescribe medication-assisted treatment remotely. In talking to those who are recovery coaches or those doctors back home who specialize in addiction, they tell me they believe that the telehealth option has been extremely important, so even though it has gotten worse, it would have gotten even worse if people had not had at least the ability to access their recovery program through a remote means. Interestingly, these telehealth options for addiction treatments were put in place temporarily, but they have proven to be such a viable option for addiction treatment that now people are talking about making them permanent. I agree with that. I don't think it makes sense to get away from them as this pandemic goes away, which is why yesterday, along with my colleague, Sheldon Whitehouse, I entered this legislation called the Telehealth Response for E-Prescribing Addiction Services Treatment Act. The reason that is such a long name is we wanted to make the acronym TREATS, which it is. The TREATS Act makes permanent a number of temporary waivers for telehealth services and bolsters telehealth options for addiction treatment services. Let's turn to a couple of things specifically. First, it allows for a patient to be prescribed lower-scheduled drugs like Suboxone through a telehealth visit on their first visit, as opposed to having to go in person for that first visit. Current law requires an in-person visit when you need an initial prescription for controlled substances, but this has been a real deterrent for patients in crisis and in urgent need of treatments from Schedule III or Schedule IV drugs like Suboxone or certain drugs for reoccurring mental health conditions, so our bill is important in that regard. It also limits abusive practices by limiting telehealth visits to those who have both audio and video capabilities to be able to interact with the treatment providers to reduce fraud and abuse when it is your first visit. It would also keep the existing requirements for in-person visits when prescribing Schedule II drugs like opioids or stimulants that are more prone to being abused during these telehealth visits. So we have provisions in there to avoid abuse, but it is important to continue this telehealth option when other options just aren't there. Second, our bill would allow for Medicare to bill for audio-only or telephone telehealth services for mental health and substance abuse treatment if it is not the patient's first visit. Due to distance or access to broadband, in-person visits or even video appointments aren't always possible for our seniors. We still need to focus on safety and robust treatment options, but in order to balance the needs of patients, we propose to allow our Nation's seniors under Medicare to use phones for subsequent mental health or behavioral health visits when they don't have access to the internet and where face-to-face interaction just isn't as necessary. I believe this TREATS legislation will make a difference in the addiction treatment space and will help us prevent more untimely overdoses, but it is also important that we ensure that law enforcement officials can continue to go after the supply of lethal drugs coming into our communities, lethal drugs that are fueling these overdoses. The most important thing, in my view, is reducing the demand dealing with prevention, treatment, and recovery, but by stopping some of the flow of these drugs, among other things, you are reducing the supply, which raises the cost of these drugs on the street. And, unfortunately, some of these drugs are unbelievably inexpensive, given how incredibly powerful and deadly they can be. Data from the Center for Disease Control shows that the biggest driver of these surge in overdose deaths has been the class of drugs called synthetic opioids. We talked about that a moment ago. They are far deadlier than the traditional opioids like heroin but still cause far too many overdoses. The most well known of these drugs, fentanyl, is about 50 times deadlier than heroin, and it is often less expensive. It is illegally manufactured primarily in China, and then it is smuggled across our southern border or through the U.S. mail. A pound of fentanyl is lethal enough to kill half a million people. Think about that. One pound is enough to kill half a million people. We have made some progress keeping it out of the mail system. The STOP Act is now in effect. We are working with the Postal Service and also working with Customs and Border Protection to properly implement that legislation, which I authored on a bipartisan basis here several years ago, and it is finally being implemented to keep our mail system from delivering poison into our communities. But the traffickers have changed patterns, and a lot of it is now going to Mexico and then coming over land across our southern border. Across the country, law enforcement have had their hands full trying to stop the flow of synthetic opioids. Ohio State Patrol troopers seized a total of 129 pounds of fentanyl last year, enough to kill more than 60 million people. We have 11.8 million people in Ohio, but our troopers, just in Ohio, seized enough fentanyl to kill 60 million people. In one Ohio county, Cuyahoga County, there were more than 1,700 seizures of fentanyl by law enforcement in 2020. One DEA initiative to fight drug trafficking that started just last August of 2020 has resulted in the seizure of nearly 440 pounds of fentanyl. Fentanyl itself is a schedule II drug, which means that law enforcement is able to take appropriate actions to crack down on it, and that is good. But there is a hidden challenge with fentanyl, and that is that manufacturers can alter its chemical makeup in a lab to make what is known as a fentanyl analog or a copycat. It is all synthetic. So if some evil chemist somewhere can adjust the formula and make it an analog, it is not subject to the schedule II charges that law enforcement can bring. Because the chemical makeup is different in fentanyl, it is not automatically illegal at all, in fact. What is worse, these copycats can often be deadlier than fentanyl--take, for instance, carfentanil, which is 100 times as deadly as fentanyl and about 10,000 times more deadly than morphine. Just handling carfentanil, if you were to spill some on yourself, can kill you. In 2018, the Drug Enforcement Agency, DEA, made the right call by temporarily making these fentanyl-related substances illegal to possess, transport, or manufacture. Thanks to that designation, our law enforcement officials have been better able to protect our communities by seizing and destroying these fentanyl-related substances. Unfortunately, the temporary extension by DEA ends in only a few months. After May 6, 2021, these incredibly dangerous substances will no longer be subject to strict regulation by law enforcement. It will be easier for drug manufacturers in China and elsewhere to flood the United States with carfentanil and other synthetic opioids. We can't allow that to happen. Of course, we can't allow that to happen, which is why yesterday I introduced the bipartisan Federal Initiative to Guarantee Health by Targeting Fentanyl, or FIGHT Fentanyl Act, along with my colleague Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia, another State that has been devastated by the opioid epidemic. Our bill simply codifies the existing DEA precedent to permanently schedule fentanyl-related substances, allowing our law enforcement officials to continue to crack down on synthetic opioid in all of its forms. Let's provide some certainty, some predictability here, and make this permanent. Just as importantly, it is going to send a signal to both the American people and the manufacturers and smugglers that produce synthetic opioids that we have not forgotten about this threat, and we are going to do everything in our power to keep these deadly drugs out of our communities. The FIGHT Fentanyl Act and the TREATS Act are a couple of things that we could do right now on a bipartisan basis, and we should. I urge my colleagues to support them. But we have a lot more work to do in the months ahead. The authorization for the Comprehensive Addiction Recovery Act, the CARA bill we talked about earlier, expires in fiscal year 2023. And Senator Whitehouse and I will soon introduce a CARA 2.0 Act to build on the successes of CARA with an unprecedented investment in expanding access to proven treatment and recovery programs--again, programs that are shown to work by evidence for treatment and recovery than longer term recovery. CARA 2.0 includes dozens of provisions to address addiction from all fronts--research and education, treatment and recovery, criminal justice reform, dealing with prescription drugs--making it the most comprehensive legislation in our country's history. When added with the existing CARA programs that are reauthorized through 2023, we would be investing well over $1 billion to address this longstanding epidemic, again, at a time when under the pandemic the epidemic is growing. We need to be sure that as we continue to invest in the coronavirus vaccine development and distribution, we are also focusing on this epidemic. As we come out of this coronavirus pandemic--and I believe we are starting to see some signs of that--let's be sure we are not leaving in its wake more and more deaths and more and more addiction with regard to the drug addiction crisis. We need to all recognize the urgency of working to reverse this surge and nationwide overdoses and overdose deaths. As we emerge from this coronavirus pandemic, let's act now to ensure we have the tools in place to also turn the tide on this disease and get those affected the help they need. I yield my time.

Mr. PORTMAN

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 816 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. PORTMAN. Colleagues, this amendment shouldn't even be necessary, but it is. We are being asked to spend another $1.9 trillion to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, and yet we have no idea how much of the $900 billion that we just enacted 5\1/2\ weeks ago has gone out the door. We don't know. We don't know how it has been used. For that matter, we don't know how much of the roughly $2 trillion of additional coronavirus funding has gone out the door. So we need to have that information to be able to legislate responsibly, to be sure that we are doing the right thing here to help the folks whom we represent. I am going to ask for a voice vote on this. I hope we get it, but I would also like to yield to my colleague from West Virginia, Mr. Manchin.