Endless Frontier Act-- resumed

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, I, too, want to express my appreciation to Senator Crapo. We are partners in the Senate Finance Committee. As Senator Crapo really touched on, we know that sometimes around here in the Senate, it is hard to get Senators to agree on the proper way to butter a piece of toast. But what Senator Crapo and I have tried to show--and I believe this amendment does it--is that the Senate is going to come together on the urgency of outcompeting China, and that is what our legislation is all about.

Senator Crapo ticked off a number of the key measures. Obviously we feel very strongly. We spent weeks looking at it in hearings and in discussions--at how China rips off our intellectual properties, steals technology, sends dangerous counterfeits to our market, and how it undercuts manufacturers with overproduction and unfair subsidies. The fact is, the Chinese have deployed massive subsidies, incentivized overproduction in key manufacturing sectors like steel, aluminum, and solar panels, that undercuts our competitors. They have shaken down American firms for intellectual property and stolen cutting-edge technology.

Worst of all, colleagues, is the practice of forced labor, which we looked at in the Senate Finance Committee. It is morally repugnant on its own, and it is also a very substantial threat to American jobs.

I do want to spend a moment on an area where we are going to be doing a lot more work, and I am going to have plenty to say about it before this bill becomes law; and that is, as my friend from Idaho just talked about, the Chinese Government's great firewall. It blocks more than 10,000 American websites and digital platforms, and others are subjected to extreme censorship. Americans who are blocked can only watch as Chinese homegrown competitors then rip off their very best ideas, thrive in the absence of real competition, and then grow into tech behemoths themselves.

The catch is, as those Chinese-grown tech giants get bigger and bigger, using ripped-off American tech and ideas, they are also exporting their government's intolerance of free speech.

So in the case of the great firewall, we now have trade enforcement tools that really go back to the Dark Ages. Literally, some of them date back to some cases in the middle of the last century, and that, in no way, leaves us in a good position.

As Senator Crapo and I have found--and we agreed in a bipartisan manner on this--it leaves us ill-prepared to handle the fast-moving world of digital trade, where there are a lot of high-skill, high-wage jobs on the line.

So, for now, I hope Members of the Senate will strongly support this bipartisan amendment.

As Senator Crapo said, we have a lot of other things we are going to tackle. As the Presiding Officer knows, I think what we talked about yesterday, in terms of clean energy, can build on ideas of both political parties. Senator Crapo has a very good idea for tech-neutral, private sector competition for clean energy. That is his idea. I am a Democrat, and I am acknowledging my colleague's good ideas. So we have a lot to work with.

But for today, when we pass this amendment, the Crapo-Wyden amendment, we are signaling that the entire Senate is coming together on a straightforward proposition, that we want to tell our constituents that we understand the urgency of outcompeting China, and that it is going to take key tools, which is what we have developed in the Senate Finance Committee.

I urge all Senators to vote for this bipartisan amendment.

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