Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2024

Floor Speech

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Ms. HOULAHAN. Mr. Chairman, defense-centric, small businesses, and the industrial base face unique challenges in creating new advanced production lines, scaling, expanding manufacturing capacity, and in competing and leading to issues with how to best support our warfighters with key advanced defense capabilities.

For many of these U.S. businesses, translating investments into marketable products and services remains a challenge. As job creation engines, start-ups are vital to the American economy, but they often lack the resources to bring good ideas to market or to establish a contract with the Department of Department.

That is why I introduced my bipartisan bill, H.R. 3147, which establishes a defense industrial base advanced capabilities pilot program, to help small businesses bridge that gap between creating innovative ideas to help our servicemembers, and the time that it takes to get to full production capacity.

This bill builds on the success of SBIR and STTR programs to further increase private-sector commercialization of innovations derived from federally funded R&D.

I was very proud to see this bill included in this year's NDAA in Section 853 of the House-passed bill and in Section 831 of the Senate- passed bill, and now we just need to fund it.

Due to its targeted support to small businesses, it is no surprise that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has made this effort a top legislative priority, and I am very proud to have had their support over the years to make this much-needed change.

What does this amendment do?

This amendment would direct $50 million in O&M defense-wide to the Defense Production Act purchases account to fund the Advanced Defense Capabilities Pilot Program. Funding in fiscal year 2024 would accelerate the scaling, production, manufacturing, and acquisition of defense-centric advanced capabilities to bolster DIB resilience and modernize and increase our competition advantage versus China and other adversaries.

The public-private partnership pilot funding would increase support and investments for domestic small, advanced defense-focused businesses, and stimulate key defense-centric industrial base markets, create new production lines, decrease defense-centric manufacturing supply chain vulnerabilities, provide advisory and scaling support, and unlock private equity capital for advanced warfighting capability aligned with the National Defense Strategy.

Due to this targeted support to small businesses, it is really no surprise that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has made this effort a top legislative priority, and I am very proud to have their support.

As a former engineer and entrepreneur, I know how urgent this legislation is, and we have to support our talented entrepreneurs in translating their innovative ideas into marketable products and cutting edge technologies and to make sure that many endeavors don't fail because they lack access to capital.

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Ms. HOULAHAN. Mr. Chairman, I yield 30 seconds to the gentlewoman from Minnesota (Ms. McCollum), the ranking member, in support of my amendment.

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Ms. HOULAHAN. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

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Ms. HOULAHAN. Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

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