Floor Statement on H.R. 1806, the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act
May 20, 2015
Mr. Chairman, it is actually quite disappointing that we are here at this point today. And I join the ranking member and our colleagues on this side of the aisle in opposing this harmful antiscience bill, H.R. 1806.
When I first came into Congress, I was excited because we were actually working on reauthorizing the COMPETES Act. We were making investments in important research and development and technologies for the 21st century. And we were doing that in a bipartisan fashion based on bipartisan scientific and research-based recommendations. But that is not where we are today.
H.R. 1806 contains severe funding cuts to the Department of Energy, including cutting close to one-third of the budget of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and half the budget of ARPA-E. In fact, you could argue that this is not an investment in the 21st century at all: it is a throwback bill to the 20th century.
These cuts are going to cripple our Nation’s research into high-impact technologies to generate, store, and use energy and will harm our ability to compete successfully with other countries.
The bill also contains many harmful provisions restricting the Department of Energy, such as a provision preventing the results of any Department of Energy-supported fossil fuel energy research and development from being “used for regulatory assessments or determinations by Federal regulatory authorities.” That would essentially bar the EPA or the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission from using the most current research results when they set rules to protect our air, our land, and our water.
How unfortunate that this antiscience bill also includes a misguided attempt to impose a level of political review on the National Science Foundation’s gold-standard merit review system.
This is the National Science Foundation, not a political organization.
This is a dangerous proposal that would stifle the kind of high-risk, outside-the-box thinking that has put the United States on the cutting edge of scientific research.
If this bill were to become law, it would eliminate valuable and scientifically sound research on climate change within the Department of Energy under the guise of a cost-cutting measure.
After all, Mr. Chairman, isn’t that what this is about? It is about the other side just not believing in climate change, despite the science.
In addition to all of the dangerous and harmful things that this bill does do, it lacks any substantively helpful provisions in a number of areas.
I actually proposed an amendment that would simply look at our 21st century workforce by supporting research at minority-serving institutions, growing STEM fields for young people who we know have to go into the 21st century workforce. It flat-funds the education directorate at the National Science Foundation.
I can’t think of anything more harmful than doing a COMPETES legislation that is, at its core, the most anticompetitive legislation that could be put on this floor. It is a danger to the 21st century.
