Keeping Our Competitive Edge

KEEPING OUR COMPETITIVE EDGE -- (Senate - October 17, 2005)

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, in May, Senator JEFF BINGAMAN and I, with the encouragement of the Senate Energy Committee Chairman, PETE DOMENICI, asked the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering and the Institute of Medicine the following question: What are the top 10 actions, in priority order, that Federal policymakers could take over the next decade to help the United States keep our advantage in science and technology? That was our question.

To answer the question, the academies assembled a distinguished panel of business, government, and university leaders, headed by Norm Augustine, the former chair of Lockheed Martin. The panel also included three Nobel Prize laureates. The panel took our question seriously, and I intend to do everything within my power to take their recommendations seriously. Tomorrow, the Energy Committee will take the first step in that response by holding a hearing to hear from Mr. Augustine and the Academies. It will be the first opportunity Congress will have to hear their answer to our question.

This hearing is primarily about brainpower and the relationship of brainpower to good American jobs. The United States produces almost one-third of all the wealth in the world, in terms of gross domestic product but has only 5 percent of the world's population. We are a fortunate country indeed. The Academies explained this phenomenon in this way:
..... as much as 85 percent of measured growth in U.S. income per capita is due to technological change.

This technological change is the result, in the report's words, of an outpouring of:

..... well-trained people and the steady stream of scientific and technological innovations they produce.

The United States has taken extraordinary steps to help create this outpouring of trained people and new discoveries that have given us such a disproportionate share of the world's wealth. We have in our country almost all of the world's great research universities. We have a unique array of 36 Federal research laboratories. More Americans attend college than people in any other country, and the colleges they attend are the best in the world. We have had, until at least recently, a system of K-12 education unsurpassed in the world.

Government support for all these enterprises has been massive. In 2001, the Federal Government spent $22.5 billion for university-based research in science and engineering. This year the Government will provide 60 percent of American students with grants or loans to help them attend the college or university of their choice. The Federal Government will spend nearly $17 billion on grants and work-study programs and will provide an additional $52 billion in student loans.

In my last year as Governor of Tennessee, and I am sure it must have been as true in Ohio as well, or nearly true, half of State dollars and a larger proportion of local tax dollars went to support education. Our free-market environment encouraged innovation and enterprise, as well as billions of dollars invested in corporate research. Finally, to top it all off, while we have been outsourcing jobs, we have been insourcing brainpower--572,000 foreign students attend our colleges and universities. One-half of the students in our graduate programs of engineering, science, and computing are foreign students.

There are three reasons I put this question to the National Academies. First, Congress is facing huge budget challenges over the next decade as we grapple with restraining the growth of entitlement spending. I did not want tight budgets to squeeze out the necessary investments in science and technology that create good jobs. Second, as the Augustine report details, there are worrisome reports from all sides in the new competitive world marketplace that the United States will have to make an even greater effort to keep our high standard of living. To put it bluntly, people in India, China, Singapore, Finland, and Ireland know very well that since their brains work similar to our brains, if brainpower is the secret weapon to produce good jobs, then there is no reason they can't have a standard of living more similar to ours. They are working to develop better trained citizens and create their own stream of discoveries.

Third, I wanted to ask this question to those who should know the answer. Members of Congress are not the best ones to guess what the first 10 things we should do are, in the next 10 years, to keep our science and technology edge. This panel represents the best of those brains. Congress is not efficiently organized to deal with broad recommendations such as these. I intend to work with my colleagues to see that all of the recommendations in the report are introduced and given a fair hearing in various committees that have jurisdiction. I see the senior Senator from Missouri and the Senator from Ohio. Both of them have been leaders in this body on this very question of how do we keep our secret weapon, our brainpower advantage, in order to keep good jobs.

But what should happen is that President Bush should make this report the subject of his State of the Union Address and the focus of his remaining 3 years in office. This challenge cries out for executive leadership. This challenge is the real answer to most of our hopes and the solution to most of our big problems. From high gasoline prices to the outsourcing of chemical industry jobs, from the shortage of engineers to the growing number of lower wage jobs, from energy independence to controlling health care costs, this is the challenge that most Americans wish their Government would put up front.

We have begun the discussion with a bipartisan question to the wisest Americans who know the answer. We have a remarkable opportunity now because of the Augustine report, upon which we will have our hearing tomorrow. We will have an opportunity now to act on the recommendations of that report in the same spirit.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the RECORD the following items: A copy of the executive summary of the Augustine report entitled ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm.'' This is the report of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine--4 recommendations with 20 specific steps that we ought to take over the next 10 years to keep our brainpower advantage so we can keep good jobs. Second, I ask unanimous consent to have printed after that the article by Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times, on October 14, called ``Keeping Us in the Race,'' which is his commentary on the Augustine report.

http://thomas.loc.gov/