Washington, D.C. – A bipartisan amendment offered by Reps. Jane Harman (D-CA) and Vern Ehlers (R-MI) aimed at reinvigorating the US aerospace industry workforce to ensure a robust pool of talented intelligence community personnel was adopted today by voice vote to the Intelligence Authorization Act.

On the House floor, in her prepared remarks, Harman said:

I’m pleased to be here on the House floor once again with my friend Vern Ehlers to call attention to a looming crisis in our aerospace industrial base.  
 
I represent the heart of the space industrial base, and have long called my district the “satellite center of the universe.”  Most of the intelligence satellites built in the United States are produced in my district.

I have always been mindful of the need for a skilled industrial base.  Simply put, rocket scientists don’t grow on trees.

Earlier this year, on a visit to a major aerospace firm in my district, there was a stark reminder of the crisis facing this industry.  Following a briefing on an important satellite program, I asked if any of the employees in attendance had anything else to tell me.

A 31 year-old engineer raised his hand and said: “all my peers are gone.”  Engineers his age, he explained, are leaving the aerospace industry for other fields and very few are interested in taking their place.

The problem is two-fold.  More than 60% of aerospace industry workers are over 45, with 26% of them eligible for retirement in 2008. 

The result is a looming “demographic cliff” that leaves the intelligence community and the industry without the intellectual capital necessary to keep pace with global competitors. 

There are many culprits.  As a nation, we have failed to inspire our kids, particularly girls, to go into STEM fields – science, technology, engineering, and math.  There just isn’t a very big pool of qualified workers for the industry to draw from. 

But Congress and the Defense Department haven’t always helped matters.  The funding stream for intelligence programs often runs hot and cold, forcing the industry to hire and fire talent in wild boom and bust swings.

We saw the results of our failure to provide consistent funding for these key programs in the 1990s.  We tried to do intelligence on the cheap, and cheap is what we got.  Our satellite programs suffered from launch failures and performance problems, and engineers abandoned the aerospace industry in droves.

Our funding is more consistent now, as is our performance.  But it’s taken nearly a decade to regrow the engineers who left during the 90s, and they can’t be expected to work forever.

We rely on our air and space assets for intelligence gathering, tactical communications, battlefield imaging, disaster relief, and a continuously proliferating set of other applications.

To that end, our amendment expresses the sense of Congress that a skilled workforce is essential to the intelligence community’s success, and that the Director of National Intelligence should work cooperatively with other government agencies to sustain and expand a diverse workforce.

I’d like to point out that a number of features of the underlying bill were developed while I was Ranking Member on the Committee, including a multi-tiered clearance system and limitations on contractors performing detainee interrogations.  That bill is sound and merits support.

Finally, I would like to thank the co-author of this amendment, Vern Ehlers of Michigan, a senior Member of the Science Committee.  He is a true leader in this field and I am proud to be working with him.