Barbara Mikulski: “While those amendments are being cleared, one of the issues I wanted to bring to our colleagues' attention is how we are…”

“While those amendments are being cleared, one of the issues I wanted to bring to our colleagues' attention is how we are making America more competitive with this bill. Earlier in my presentation in which I gave an overview of the bill, I emphasized what we were doing in law enforcement, which I am so proud of, and of course the Presiding Officer himself as a former attorney general knows how important the Federal and local law enforcement agencies are. But this bill is called Commerce-Justice-Science. We focused, in our subcommittee--myself and my ranking member, Senator Shelby--on three issues this year: security, competitiveness, and accountability--the stewardship of the taxpayers' dollar. We focused on competitiveness because it is our subcommittee that funds the major science agencies that come up with the new ideas that help come up with the new jobs, the research that enables the private sector to take value and add to it to come up with the new products and very high-end technology. That provides jobs right in our own country and enables us to be competitive.”