Rob Portman: “today there is a discussion about transparency. I am going to talk about one that is maybe going to surprise some…”

“today there is a discussion about transparency. I am going to talk about one that is maybe going to surprise some people, but it is about the lack of transparency and about $150 billion a year that is taxpayer money that is put into research and development. It is money that we, as taxpayers, pay to places like the National Institutes of Health. The National Institutes of Health does great research. So the Federal dollars go in there to try to develop cures--as an example, for diseases, but also for other healthcare research. There is the National Science Foundation, which does a lot of research on technology and research, and the Department of Energy, which does a lot of the basic research on science in our country. So I am going to focus on that funding today and a specific problem we have right now. It is about ensuring the government remains accountable to taxpayers. It is about ensuring that hard-working American taxpayers know where their money is going, and it is about a specific issue of that money going to research that is then taken by other countries, particularly by China, and the need for us to address that issue, in part, through transparency and, in part, through actually some new criminal statutes to be able to ensure that there is accountability. Last fall, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations did a study. It was about a yearlong study.…”