Rob Portman: “I rise today in strong support of the Safeguarding American Innovation Act. This is legislation that has been included…”

“I rise today in strong support of the Safeguarding American Innovation Act. This is legislation that has been included in the substitute amendment to the bill we are working on this week, called the Endless Frontier Act, or as it has now been called, the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act. Well, if our goal is to increase U.S. competitiveness and encourage more U.S. innovation, we have to not only invest in research and innovation, we have to be sure that we are keeping our investment in research and intellectual property from being taken by our competitors and used against us. That is what this legislation does. By the way, that is just common sense, or so you would think, but that is not what we found during a bipartisan investigation during the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Instead, during a yearlong inquiry, we uncovered that our government and our research institutions over the last couple of decades have permitted China to take advantage of a lax U.S. approach to safeguarding our taxpayer-funded innovation, be it in our college campuses or in our research labs, nor was law enforcement, principally the FBI, doing anything significant to combat this threat. In fact, at our hearing on the report about 18 months ago, the FBI admitted in sworn testimony that they have been asleep at the switch, essentially. Our PSI investigation detailed the rampant theft of U.S.…”