Taking A Hard Look At the National Stockpile

Floor Speech

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Ms. SLOTKIN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to urge my colleagues to pass my bill, the Strengthening America's Strategic National Stockpile Act, so that we never again are dependent on foreign manufacturers for the supplies we need to keep Americans safe.

This bipartisan bill, brought to this Chamber by eight Democrats and eight Republicans, would make sure our country never again endures what we went through in those early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when we all received those urgent calls, only to learn that our stockpile, the national stockpile, would only provide a fraction of what we needed, many pieces inside expired, some of them molding.

This bill would ensure that we have a properly maintained national stockpile of medical supplies so that our doctors, nurses, and frontline workers have the personal protective equipment they need to protect themselves while helping others.

Put yourself back into the mindset of April 2020: frantic calls and e-mails from essential workers begging for help. As cases of COVID surged, both in our hospitals and in our nursing homes, our frontline workers made it clear that they simply didn't have enough protective equipment to keep themselves safe.

In fact, the National Institutes of Health conducted a study on why we have a shortage of protective equipment. Through that study, they found that the U.S. anticipated--we knew--that our national supply would come up short, and they estimated that we would need 3.5 billion N95 masks to protect Americans from a pandemic that affected only a third of our country. This is why we cannot move on without cleaning up our system.

In 2020, every Member of this body was hearing from doctors, nurses, and first responders who were bravely battling this disease and improvised face shields and homemade solutions to protect themselves.

I still think about the physician in Brighton, Michigan, who compared his job to being a soldier on the front lines, wearing only a T-shirt and a baseball cap instead of body armor and a helmet; or the nurses in Mason, Michigan, who had to share one gown, not per person, but for the entire staff on a COVID ward.

In response, I found myself doing anything and everything I could to secure protective equipment for Michigan: calling mask manufacturers, negotiating with companies in China, and fighting for each and every shipment. I was sending Ziplocs of 10 masks to our nursing homes individually. If a Congresswoman is negotiating in the dead of night with a Chinese middleman for masks, our supply chains have officially failed us.

This searing experience shook me to my core. We can and must do better to protect Americans and to learn from our mistakes.

This bill, the Strengthening America's Strategic National Stockpile Act, would ensure that if States ever need to turn to it, our stockpile will be fully supplied, maintained, and ready to go.

It requires constant maintenance and inventory checks to make sure items aren't expired. We need to make the distribution process transparent. It helps States to create their own local stockpiles, and it prevents waste of taxpayer dollars by allowing the stockpile to sell excess supplies to other agencies before they expire.

Perhaps most importantly, this bill incentivizes production of critical medical supplies right here at home, in the United States. Through a $500 million program, the stockpile will partner directly with American manufacturers to expand capacity and strengthen our domestic supply chains.

Now, in Michigan, we get it. Before the pandemic, the mere mention of supply chains was enough to put some to sleep. But the last year and a half has changed that. The issue is now on the front page of every paper and at the heart of every key business and policy decision.

From masks to microchips, the disruptions we have experienced have forced us to pull back the curtain and take a hard look at the systems we rely on in our daily lives. Michiganders have been saying this for 30 years. If you outsource our supply chains too far to China, it becomes a national security issue, and it has.

Here in Congress, we have a responsibility to respond to the way this crisis has shook our communities for our first responders and our businesses. I ask my colleagues from both sides of the aisle to vote ``yes'' on this critical piece of legislation. Help clean up the mess that was on display last year. That is our job and our responsibility to the next crisis.

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