Drug Quality and Security Act - Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, earlier this afternoon, I appeared with Senator Blunt, my Republican friend from Missouri, in front of Senator Rockefeller's Commerce Committee to talk about our bipartisan legislation with manufacturing hubs. It would promote new technologies to make our country a leader in advanced manufacturing.

Let me illustrate by saying this: Along the Ohio Turnpike--from Toledo, to Lorain, to Cleveland, to Akron, to Youngstown--much of the auto industry grew, from glass that would go for windshields in Toledo, to steel in Lorain and Cleveland for the fenders and the hoods and much of the car, to rubber in Akron for tires--the world's leading tire manufacturer--to assembly in Youngstown, where today the Chevy Cruze is made. If you are on the Ohio Turnpike, you will see this huge plant with the big letters ``CHEVY CRUZE.'' If you have not been at an auto plant or you are not from Ohio and you may not have seen one, the expansiveness of this plant is pretty remarkable. Autos were assembled all along this turnpike.

But the reason this matters--in addition to why it matters in the Presiding Officer's State of Connecticut and other places--is not just that the auto industry, the supply chain, creates jobs, but what happens when an industry sort of locates with a critical mass in a community.

Because Toledo, OH, with the auto industry, had huge glass manufacturing, the University of Toledo had scientists who worked in material science and in glass manufacturing. Today, as a result, while we do not make quite as much glass in Toledo as we did for autos, Toledo is one of the top two or three largest centers for solar energy manufacturing.

Go to Akron, which used to be the center of the world for tire manufacturing. There is not so much of that now, although Goodyear's corporate headquarters is still there and there is a lot of research. But now, again, in partnership with the University of Akron, the scientists who were processing and researching and innovating in rubber and tires--now, for polymer development and manufacturing, Akron is one of the leaders in the country and in the world.

The lesson we learned is what Senator Blunt and I were talking about. We know in Ohio and Missouri manufacturing is a ticket to the middle class. We also know that for too long Washington made choices which biased finance over manufacturing, that left manufacturing behind--bad trade deals, failure to enforce trade laws, taxes that did not work for manufacturing, and a kind of backing off of a focus on innovation and technology.

So we have seen communities such as Lordstown and Cleveland and Dayton live with the consequences. Between 2000 and 2010, 60,000 plants closed in this country and 5 million manufacturing jobs were lost.

Since the auto rescue and the more aggressive trade enforcement from President Obama--while I do not agree with some of his trade policies, he has been more aggressive on trade enforcement, through the Commerce Department and through the International Trade Commission, than any of his predecessors in either party.

So since 2010, we have seen a beginning of growth coming back in manufacturing--not nearly making up anything close to the 5 million jobs lost or the 60,000 plants closed. But the importance of manufacturing--not just because it is in my State, where my State is No. 3 in the country in production, in manufacturing; and only Texas, with twice our population, and California, with three times our population, make more than we do--but the importance of manufacturing is the multiplier effect. More than any other industry in our country, in manufacturing, for every $1 spent in manufacturing, another $1.48 is added to the economy. We know what that means in the auto supply chain or in the wind turbine supply chain or in the chemical supply chain or anything we manufacture in this country. But what is holding us back is this--we never consciously follow this--but this sort of ``innovate here, make it there'' syndrome. Yes, we still have the best scientists, the best engineers, the best researchers, the best universities. Whether it is storrs at the University of Connecticut or in Cleveland at Case Western or in Dayton or in Cincinnati, we have the best universities, the best researchers, but too often we do the innovation, we do the discovery, we do the experimentation that leads to products, and then we offshore and make the products there.

Let me give you an example about why that does not work and what does work. There is a small community in Ohio: Minster, OH. It is not far from Wapakoneta, Neil

Armstrong's hometown--the first man who walked on the moon--and just north of Dayton. It is in Auglaize County, where I visited some time ago. It has the largest yogurt manufacturer in North America. When I went in that plant, they had just made it more efficient. In the past, their supplier had delivered little plastic cups to this yogurt manufacturer. In the plant they had these big silver vats of fermented milk with yogurt, and they would squirt this yogurt into these plastic cups and seal it and package it.

A young industrial engineer and a couple of people who had worked on the line for a decade or so said: We can do this better. Instead of bringing the plastic cups in from a supplier, they did something simple for an engineer--not so simple for me. They took plastic rolls, and they fed a plastic sheet into a machine--the whole assembly line was maybe 80 feet long--and the plastic would be heated and then extruded and then cooled slowly, and the yogurt would be squirted into the plastic cup and sealed and sent.

Now, the innovation took place on the shop floor. That is what happens. When you develop a product, wherever you manufacture it, the innovation, the product innovation and the process innovation--the process innovation meaning how you make it, the process of making it, as they did Dannon yogurt in the packaging and the actual improvement of the product--it takes place on the shop floor. That is why this is so important.

This legislation, the Revitalize American Manufacturing and Innovation Act of 2013, creates a Network for Manufacturing Innovation and would position the U.S. as the world's leader in advanced manufacturing.

We have already done something like this in Youngstown, OH, mentioned by the President in his State of the Union message, the first ever National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute. It is called America Makes. It is in conjunction with the University of Missouri and in conjunction with businesses and universities--Eastern Gateway and Youngstown State in the Mahoning Valley and the University of Pittsburgh. It is sort of this tech belt along there. They do something called 3-D printing, which is kind of hard to conceptualize, until you see it. But it really is something to look for in the future.

We know how to produce in this country. We have seen, with some Federal funding matched by $40 million in private funds, it is making Youngstown a world leader in 3-D printing manufacturing technology already.

We need to build on this momentum. That is why our legislation is so important. It is supported by manufacturing associations, semiconductor groups. We have seen other countries begin to sort of mimic it and parrot it and imitate it. We know we have something here that will help America lead the world.

In concluding, before yielding to the Senator from Oregon, think of this in terms of a teaching hospital, where you have a great teaching hospital at the University of Cincinnati or Ohio State or Case Western in Cleveland or the University of Toledo. At these teaching hospitals--where research and development and innovation are happening with great scientists and great doctors and great researchers--often what they produce, what they come up with is commercialized locally, and you build a critical mass in that field. In some kind of scientific medical field you build that expertise in that region. That is what we want to do with these manufacturing hubs, like NMI in Youngstown, where in Youngstown we will see all kinds of job creation that will make Youngstown the vital city that it has been in much of its history and we want to see it become in the future.

It is good for our country. It is good for manufacturing. It is good for families who earn their living from manufacturing. And it will be particularly good for our communities.

I yield the floor.

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