Laken Riley Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, some people in the Chamber who served in the Senate may remember my predecessor Paul Simon of Illinois. Simon was ahead of his time on so many issues, including the importance of clean drinking water and sanitation for the poorest people in the world.

He wrote a book called ``Tapped Out.'' He autographed this copy and gave it to me in 1998, many years ago. It certainly was not a New York Times best seller, but Paul wrote about what he said was ``The Coming World Crisis in Water and What We Can Do About It.'' I read this book and reflected on it over the years.

Some 30 years have passed. How many times do people talk about clean drinking water and sanitation? It is so critical to public health and so critical to development. Sometimes, we are looking for a big solution, a complex solution, when a simple solution is the first thing that is needed. Paul Simon realized that and that focusing on providing clean drinking water to some of the poorest places in the world can be transformative.

He understood that to avoid conflict between nations, to keep girls in school and reduce infant mortality, to improve health and economic opportunity, you have to provide people with access to clean water. Data supports this. Each dollar spent on clean water and sanitation returns between $4 and $8 in economic health and other benefits, which is why I decided to do something about it as a Member of the U.S. Senate.

I knew his family, I knew Paul, and I knew the last thing in the world he ever wanted was someone to build a statue of his image for future generations. But he would have been happy with perhaps the bill that I introduced entitled the Paul Simon Water for the World Act, legislation that built on an earlier law to improve access to clean water and sanitation around the world. Former Representative Earl Blumenauer and former Senator Bob Corker, a Republican in Tennessee, were my partners on this bipartisan effort.

Ten years ago, the legislation passed the Senate unanimously-- something that is almost unimaginable today with the politics we live with--but that underscored the true urgency and importance of this issue. Not only was this legislation the right thing to do, but it made access to clean water and sanitation for the world's poor a development priority for the United States.

As a result of the bills that I introduced with my colleagues and sustained bipartisan funding over the last 13 years, American leadership has provided first-time, sustainable access to clean water to more than 76 million people and access to sanitation to 58 million.

I can remember a visit I made years and years ago to Port-au-Prince in Haiti. It is one of the poorest places on Earth, and of course, it is in our hemisphere. A lady who is a medical doctor and administrator of a clinic wanted to show me something. They had been having trouble with waterborne illness, and a lot of people were sick. Some children were dying.

She said they then decided to build a cistern of pure water and to protect it and make sure the village could draw from that water when they needed it. She said it has changed everything. The kids aren't dying. People aren't sick. Things have improved dramatically. She walked out to show me a sewer lid and a pump on it. She said to me, We got this from the United States. It had something to do with a man named Paul Simon. I laughed almost out loud, thinking for goodness' sake. I said, How much did you have to invest in this?

She said $15,000. That is $15,000 that has saved lives and had made a difference, and it was in Paul's name, I was happy to report.

This is incredible work, and I want to salute my staffer Chris Homan, who has traveled around Africa and parts of Asia to see these investments. They do make a dramatic difference in the lifestyle of people, giving them dignity, giving them life, giving them a future.

Another such story is from a rural area of Ghana where these kinds of programs have already eliminated waterborne illnesses. We can see, when visited this project, that the investment--this small investment--by the United States made an affordable and sustainable infrastructure that families can use for sanitation options and safe drinking water. The two have to go hand in hand.

This investment made a project where a disabled woman lives a place where she can find dignity, as the name suggests, for she no longer has to crawl through snake-filled fields to use the river.

But this lifesaving work is far from done. As the climate crisis worsens and industrial needs increase, ensuring global access to clean water supplies is as important as ever.

The book might not have been a best seller, but the idea sure was. And I sure hope that we continue this modest investment in villages around the world that literally saves and transforms lives.

Around 2 billion people on this planet Earth still lack access to safe drinking water, so I hope this historically important, bipartisan investment will continue long into the future ahead of us. Lives depend on it.

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