Madam President, I come to the floor once again to talk about good jobs–about manufacturing jobs–and about what we can do together in this Chamber to strengthen the vital manufacturing sector of the American economy.
Last year, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown and Republican Senator Roy Blunt came together in a bipartisan effort to cosponsor an important bill, S. 1468, the Revitalize American Manufacturing and Innovation Act of 2013–an effort to build a national network for manufacturing and innovation, also known as manufacturing innovation hubs.
This bill, if enacted, would allow us to build institutes across our country dedicated to discovering the next breakthroughs in technology and translating them into the next breakthroughs in manufacturing. I have been proud to support and fight for this bill, and now, because of my colleagues’ leadership and determination, we are close to getting a vote.
We have heard about the importance of these innovation hubs for manufacturing before. Last year two hubs opened–one in Youngstown, OH, and another in Raleigh, NC. Just last week I was thrilled to hear about two more opening–one in Detroit and another in Chicago.
These hubs are good first steps, but they are being done by the executive branch, without express and explicit authorization for a whole and broader program through this bill, which would extend this national network, would make its life longer and greater, and give more specific details to the process by which they would be authorized going forward.
It is my hope, having already seen several demonstrations on a more modest scale, this Congress will come together in a bipartisan way and enact this legislation to put a framework in place for the long term.
These hubs, as I said, are good first steps, but we in Congress can and should do more. In my home State of Delaware we are blessed to have some remarkable institutions of higher learning: Delaware State University, led by the great President Dr. Harry Williams; the University of Delaware–both research institutions which benefit from federally funded research and both of which do work in energy and engineering, relevant to manufacturing. We also have Del Tech–Delaware Technical & Community College–which does great workforce training and partners with manufacturers. We also have a whole series of manufacturers, large and small; some iconic companies such as DuPont, some unknown outside my State that employ dozens or hundreds.
What a manufacturing hub would do is bring together a university that is doing cutting-edge research in a new field with companies looking to start manufacturing using that technology, with those community colleges and others who would train the new workforce, creating a network that would do the innovative work in an iterative way that would accelerate new manufacturing opportunities.
The reason this bill has such a diverse set of bipartisan backers–from Democrats such as Sherrod Brown, Debbie Stabenow, and myself, to Republicans such as Roy Blunt, Lindsey Graham, and Mark Kirk–is because these hubs represent a great example of how the Federal Government can help foster partnerships between businesses, universities, and communities in a hands-off way.
As to these first four hubs I mentioned, in these instances, the Federal Government is also getting terrific leverage. There is a more than 1-to-1 match from private, State, and local partnerships in these existing hubs–partnerships, I might add, that have national reach, giving the hubs the potential to benefit not just their immediate regions or their immediate communities but the whole country.
General Dynamics and Honeywell, for example, are two of the partner companies in the Youngstown, OH, lab. They have footprints all across our country. At the hub in Raleigh, NC, researchers from other universities–such as Arizona State and Florida State–are collaborators as well, contributing their knowledge to the great work of these hubs and then also bringing back to their labs and their communities what is being learned through this common collaborative work.
So the Youngstown and Raleigh hubs–now well established–are about more than just those two cities, and the hubs in Detroit and Chicago will be about more than just Michigan and Illinois, and the hubs we would create, we would authorize, through this bill would be about more than just the cities or States in which they are based.
By bringing together such a wide-ranging and diverse set of partners, hubs allow many different stakeholders to pool their resources, minimizing the risks of investing in the early stage research that is critical to innovation but not feasible for one company alone to invest in.
It is about the private sector coming together with the university and public sectors to solve tough problems without just one firm bearing all the risk or the burden. R&D–research and development–as we know, is critical to our economic future. These hubs offer an innovative model for increasing our national capacity for invention.
The Federal Government acts as a convener for private firms, nonprofits, universities, and researchers, creating an environment where they can all do what they do best and share it. This idea transcends ideology or party. That is why I think Members of both parties should feel comfortable getting behind this bill. It has been endorsed by folks ranging from the National Association of Manufacturers to Del Bio, which represents the bio and pharmaceutical community, and folks in the private sector and public sector in my own State and in States across the country.
Manufacturing is at the heart of what can and should make this country competitive and prosperous in this century. At the end of the day, this is about creating good jobs. Manufacturing jobs are high-quality jobs. It has a significant secondary benefit in the community as well as having higher wages and benefits than jobs in any other sector.
If we are looking for the key to a dynamic innovation economy, we need to look no further than manufacturers. They invest more in R&D than any other private sector within the country.
When we think of manufacturing and innovation today, we often picture researchers in the United States inventing things and manufacturing factories overseas. But that is not how sophisticated, advanced manufacturing innovation works anymore. The reality is that innovation is just not linear. R&D and manufacturing need to be closer together. It does not just start in the lab and then get sent to a factory and then to a store and your home. More often R&D results in innovations that improve the products already in our home, that improve the manufacturing process to discover better ways to make things faster, more safely, more efficiently, and that innovative cycle can speed up the more closely connected and articulated it is.
By creating these manufacturing innovation hubs, all of which focus on a specific sector or industry, we can help fuel the discoveries that will make manufacturing a critical part of our long-term economic future, while ensuring that the discoveries that change our world are made here in America and the products that come out of them are manufactured here in America.
These hubs focus on emerging areas where there is enormous potential. For example, the hub in Youngstown, OH, is focused on 3D printing, which already has the potential to transform how manufacturing, large-scale and small-scale, is done not just in the United States but around the world. We believe–I certainly believe we should continue to be at the cutting edge of developing and deploying what 3D printing has to offer.
The one in Raleigh, NC, is about wide bandgap semiconductors or energy-efficient electronics and will likely dominate much of the next generation of electronics. Again, why would we not want to be on the ground for not just the inventing of new technologies but demonstrating how to manufacture them?
In Detroit, researchers and businesses and universities and other stakeholders in this newest hub will work together on advanced lightweight materials, on remarkable metals that are stronger, more durable, more ductile, and more lightweight than other existing materials, with applications, of course, in automobiles but across a very wide range of products and platforms.
Lastly, in Chicago, small businesses, universities, and larger companies are working together on some remarkable advances that speed up the whole manufacturing process so new ideas can go from the lab to your home faster than ever before.
Hubs such as these are central to our competitiveness because it is not just about the work happening at the lab or the institute itself; it is about how they then attract companies with a national reach to an area that is capable of building sustainable and dynamic local economies. It is about bringing researchers and manufacturers together to spur innovation, commercialize R&D, and create good jobs that do not go somewhere else. It is about the larger impact for our communities and our country, as innovation breeds new supply chains and new businesses locally and across our country.
Today’s global economy is more competitive than it has ever been. We are competing not just with developing countries that have lower labor and environmental standards or lower wages but also with developed nations that are trying to out-educate, out-research, and out-innovate us. Germany, for example, has a well-developed, well-established, well-deployed network of more than 60 manufacturing innovation hubs exactly like the ones I have just described. It also has fairly high labor and environmental standards but is the manufacturing powerhouse of Europe. It has nearly double the percentage of its GDP in manufacturing as the United States.
How are they able to do this? How can they sustain these high levels of manufacturing? It is in no small part because of the manufacturing innovation hubs they have developed and deployed.
So let’s get this done. There is absolutely no reason that the season of governing and of legislating here in Washington needs to be over, especially when there is so much important work to do–work that I know we can and should get done on a bipartisan basis. Senators Brown and Blunt have done great work and shown strong leadership in developing this bill, refining this bill, and getting it to this point.
Let’s show that we can come together in areas where we do agree and put campaigns and politics aside for now and put American jobs and American innovation first.