Nomination of Katherine Archuleta to Be Director of the Office of Personnel Management

Floor Speech

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Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, this is one of those all-too-rare occasions anymore where we all agree, and it is about making things. We will be talking for the next few minutes about what happens in our country and what needs to happen so we can not just make things again--because we still make lots of things, and we make them very well--but what we need to do to be able to make more things. What do we need to do to be sure we are at the competitive front of the line as we work to make things.

All of us are working on things together. Senator Brown and I have been working on advanced manufacturing--something that he has spoken about and we have spoken about together and that he has been a leader on for a long time--and all of our States benefit.

Missouri and Ohio have certainly been among the significant manufacturing States. In Missouri we have more than $32 billion a year in manufacturing. For about the last 4 years that has been the top manufacturing employment, has been in the agricultural industry, in food processing, as well as transportation equipment, fabricated metals, machinery of all kinds, and automobiles have been in the top of our manufacturing sectors.

I believe we are really at a point where so many things could easily come together, and the Federal Government and the Congress can help make those things come together by taking down barriers and by creating easier ways to work together. In the case of advanced manufacturing, we have talked about the centers of excellence and we have worked on that together, and we have both seen some of these ideas work.

I wish to ask Senator Brown some of the things he has seen and the things he thinks we can do better through the legislation we have been talking about.

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Mr. BLUNT. The Senator's point is well made. These manufacturing jobs are goods jobs. The American workforce is competitive. As Senator Brown said, we have always been on the cutting edge, the outside of competition, making things in a better way than we did last year. Everybody who is competing today is trying to figure out how they can do whatever they did last year better. We see that and what we can add to that, how we can make that process work better.

In our State, the average manufacturing job pays 21.5 percent more than the average wage. Mr. President, $52,000 or so for the average manufacturing job salary in Missouri is a significant improvement in where you might otherwise be. In Missouri we have 6,500 manufacturing firms. Almost a quarter of a million people work in manufacturing in Missouri. We used to have more than that. We used to have more than that, and I think we will have more than that again. The country used to do more in terms of manufacturing than it does now. But we are going to see that happen.

The Senator from Delaware just wrote an article in Congressional Quarterly that talked about what needs to be done, the great opportunities we have in energy. If we take advantage of those great energy opportunities, suddenly the utility bill is more predictable, the delivery system is more guaranteed.

I was talking to a manufacturer today in my office and this topic came up. At some point now, as you get further and further into innovation, people not only have to be better trained--the Senator talked about that too: the importance of a skilled workforce--but how the workforce competes with maybe a lower paid workforce in some other country maybe is not nearly as important as how the utility bill competes.

If you can run that facility--and I just gave him an example of another manufacturing facility in my hometown of Springfield, MO, that was making a significant expansion, I think about a $150 million expansion. They did not expect to hire any more people, but they expect to use that current workforce in a much more competitive way. Nobody was losing a job because of advanced competition. They are just expanding that workforce in a way that ensures they will keep their job and be more competitive. Of course, somebody, by the way, is building that expansion. There are jobs there as well. And those all matter.

We have all kinds of examples.

Perryville, MO, is a town of less than 10,000 people. In that town, they have become a hub--it is about 80 miles south of St. Louis--of 21st century manufacturing. A Japanese company is there, Toyoda Gosei, that makes plastic components for automobiles. Sabreliner makes aviation parts and is in the airplane industry. There is Gilster-Mary Lee, a much more traditional employer. But here is a town that has a significant number of manufacturing jobs.

The town of Cassville, near Springfield, for a number of years had more manufacturing jobs than they had population. Now, of course, that meant in the part of the country where I live lots of people may have been driving a significant number of miles to get to those jobs. But there are not very many cities. This is a smaller community. It is the county seat of Barry County. But they had more manufacturing jobs than the number of people who lived in the community itself. It meant that is a competitive community. That is a community that knows how to build jobs.

Perryville is a community that has launched itself well into the 21st century. And the skills the Senator was talking about--the skilled workforce, the energy needs, the research component--one of the components of these hubs of excellence that we have been looking at and talking about, Senator Brown and I have been working on, is to create ways to encourage that higher education be part of that research component.

I think Americans are eager to produce. I bet the Senator and I both hear the same thing over and over: How can we have a strong economy if we do not produce? Well, you can have a strong economy in parts of the economy that do not produce, but I think not only do you need to produce, but there is something that defines who we are in a positive way when people see American production that is not only heavily competitive here but competitive all over the world.

I think that is what Senator Coons and I are talking about, the kind of bipartisan effort we need to make. I do not know any Republicans or any Democrats anywhere, or any Independents, who have said: Oh, we don't need to worry about making things. We don't need to worry about a competitive economy. Actually, private sector jobs should be the No. 1 domestic goal of the Federal Government today. And the jobs we are talking about are a significant component because they lead to lots of other jobs. All of the ripple effects of manufacturing jobs are great: the other businesses that spring up, the suppliers that come.

Of course, the Senator and I have talked about his father was a significant part of launching new things into the marketplace. I think that is what the Senator and I want to see this Congress encourage, as we can encourage things without law and look for legislative ways to facilitate a growth back toward manufacturing.

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Mr. BLUNT. Let me just talk a little bit about the startup act that Senator Coons and I have worked on. The Senator mentioned, I think, all the cosponsors of that: Senator Rubio, Senator Stabenow, Senator Moran, Senator Kaine, Senator Schumer, and Senator Enzi.

What that does is try to extend the opportunity of research and development to startup businesses. The way the tax credit works, you can deduct those costs from the taxes you pay. Well, if you are a startup business, you often do not have any profit to deduct from. That is part of the courage, frankly, of starting a business. You are almost insured, guaranteed, that for the first weeks, months, sometimes the first years, depending on how big a venture this is, you are not making money yet. So what the Senator and I and our friends have done in the startup act is say--these people would have employees--so what we do is allow the same tax credit for a big corporation or a big business or a highly successful business with lots of profit to be applied against what they pay as taxes for their employees--the Social Security tax, the other taxes that are paid--and, again, trying to encourage innovation.

We all know that small business is the engine that drives the country. But also small business can be the engine that drives manufacturing, if we figure out a way to let them have some of the same benefits that existing businesses have that have already gotten themselves in a profit-making situation. This just gives them a place to go and utilize that credit.

That is the kind of thing we ought to be looking at. Startup businesses are important, encouraging traditional businesses to figure out how to upgrade their equipment, upgrade the way they do things so they are more competitive in an international marketplace. I really do firmly believe that for reasons the Senator mentioned--the wage gap is not what it was, the transportation costs are more than they were to get something made from somewhere else back to the greatest market in world, the United States of America; and the more we know about the utility bills--Senator Donnelly from Indiana, who is the Presiding Officer, and I have been working on things that pay attention to the utility bills. Again, that is a key component of future manufacturing. The more competitive you are, the more innovative you are, the more you are likely to be concerned about that part of your input costs. And sometimes when you expand, the utility bill is a bigger than the additional labor cost. But that may be exactly what ensures you can keep the labor you have and grow that labor by being able to make a commitment that you feel good about because you feel good about your ability to run that facility once you build it. You feel good that not only is it going to work this year, but, by the way, we are doing so well and doing so many things that 10 years from now we feel whatever the utility costs are going to be, they are going to be within the range we can deal with and still produce right in Missouri, right in Ohio, right in Delaware, or right in Indiana.

That is the kind of thing we ought to be focusing on. How do we make things again? How do we create other kinds of private sector jobs, the No. 1 domestic priority of the country today?

Every time the Senator and I talk about manufacturing, I really do get excited about an America that is thinking about not are we going to be able to continue to make what we have always made, but what can we make better than anybody else that we are not making yet that is going to allow us to be out there in a world marketplace? Trade has become a much greater opportunity for the American workforce, as all of these other factors we have been talking about on the floor have come together to make our workforce what it is.

If Senator Coons has any final remarks, I would like him to finish our time here on the floor.

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