Rob Portman: “I thank my colleague from Georgia and appreciate his work on this legislation. I know that he and the Senator from…”

“I thank my colleague from Georgia and appreciate his work on this legislation. I know that he and the Senator from Tennessee have been talking about the legislation earlier today. I understand that Senator Alexander talked about some of the work we have done together to try to make sure this legislation does not just reauthorize an existing program but improves that program to give more focus on how to take our Federal worker retraining program to make it work for America's workers at a critical time. We just learned that the economy, in the first quarter, grew even less than we had thought. I think it now has been readjusted to almost minus 3 percent--minus 2.9 percent growth. We have big problems in terms of our economy getting moving. One of the problems we have is we do not have the trained workers for the 21st century jobs that are out there. I rise today as the Senate is on the verge of passing this first comprehensive reform of our Nation's primary workforce development programs in about 16 years, to say that I appreciate, again, the fact that Members on both sides of the aisle have worked with me and others to put some reforms into this program to ensure it works better for our workers and for our competitiveness and for our ability to actually get this economy moving again. We do have this weak economy. And sometimes we are sort of numb to it. We forget that this is not just a typical recovery; it is a very slow recovery.…”