A bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 120 12th Street Lobby in Columbus, Georgia, as the "Richard W. Williams, Jr., Chapter of the Triple Nickles (555th P.I.A.) Post Office".

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, this is the 32nd time I have come to the

floor in the last year to talk about an issue that unfortunately is getting worse--not better--and that is the epidemic of opioids; that would be heroin, prescription drugs, and now, more recently, synthetic heroin, also known as fentanyl or U-4 or carfentanil.

Every single day we are now losing 144 Americans to drug overdoses. Think about that, every single day, 144 people. By the way, that means, during the time it takes to give these remarks, which will be about 12 minutes, on average, we are losing another American to this opioid epidemic.

It is an issue that is now so serious that it has overtaken car accidents or even homicides from gun violence as the No. 1 accidental cause of death in our country.

It is easy to get discouraged because we see these statistics. We hear about the overdoses. We hear about the deaths. We hear about the difficulty for people to get out of the grips of this addiction. The relapse rate is high. It is an issue that is affecting every single community in this Chamber. By the way, it is affecting our inner cities, it is affecting our suburbs, it is affecting our rural areas and every group of Americans out there. No one is immune from this, and it knows no ZIP Code.

Yet today I want to talk a little about some of the reasons for hope and some of the models of success out there because this Congress, to its credit in the last year, has actually gotten much more serious about this issue. We passed two pieces of legislation to help; particularly, to provide better prevention and education to keep people from getting into the funnel of addiction and then, second, to help in terms of providing the resources: the treatment, the recovery. The longer term recovery, in particular, it is the first time Congress has stepped up on that.

We also need to do a better job ensuring that our law enforcement and our other first responders have what they need to save lives and to be able to reverse the effects of overdoses through this miracle drug called naloxone or Narcan. It is part of the legislation that has not just been passed but is beginning to be implemented.

Fortunately, in my own State of Ohio--although we have one of the worst addiction problems in the country--we also have a lot of really compassionate people who have stepped forward and are taking advantage of these resources, including not only resources from Washington now but also from State and local governments and from so many nonprofits out there. They are taking advantage of that to provide better treatment, better recovery, and better prevention. As a result, they are saving lives.

On Saturday, I visited a group called Clean Acres in Wilmington, OH. It is a farm that provides recovery housing for men. These are men who are struggling with addiction. They work on the farm. They provide each other support, and it has been very successful for a lot of them.

I met a guy named Dan, who told me how Clean Acres is helping him get his life back. For over a decade, he was a heroin addict. He shot up every morning until one day, he was actually at work, and he passed out. He was digging a ditch, and he passed out.

He was rushed to the hospital. The doctors discovered he had a very serious infection related to his intravenous drug use. He required emergency, lifesaving surgery right then.

The doctors told him he might not wake up. He did wake up after that surgery, and there before him were his three kids. He hadn't seen them in 5 years because--in so many cases you hear this and as Dan said this--the drugs became everything. He said, not his family, not his relationships, not his friends, not his work--the drugs became everything. These three kids had come to his bedside because they thought it might have been his deathbed, he said.

He saw these three kids, whom he hadn't seen in 5 years. He said that even after having experienced this near-death operation and having his three kids there, the first thought that came to his mind was: Where can I get another hit? Where can I get another hit? But then, in the situation he was in, he prayed, and he said his prayer was: ``Lord, help me get out of here.'' ``Help me get out of here,'' meaning, ``help me get out of this situation.''

He made a decision. He was going to try treatment again. He had tried treatment before. So many recovering addicts and addicts I talk to around my State have been in and out of treatment programs, detox treatment. It hasn't worked.

He decided this time he was not just going to get into treatment, but he was going to try something different, which was not to go back to the old neighborhood, not to go back to his old friends, but instead to try longer term recovery. That is how he ended up at Clean Acres. That is this farm where he and other men live together. They work, but they support each other to try to keep their lives on track after their treatment is over. It doesn't provide the treatment, but it does provide them with the meetings they need to be able to have that support around them in order to keep clean.

As one of the men at Clean Acres told me, it is hard to go through treatment. It is much harder to stay clean after treatment.

So Dan is healing himself. He is working at the farm. He plans to go into construction. He has big plans now. That is the hope. That is the opportunity for people to get their lives back on track whom I see every day when I talk to the people in my home State of Ohio.

Last week, I was also at Racing for Recovery, outside of Toledo, OH. I met with Todd Crandell. He has been in recovery from addiction for about 20 years. He is now giving back in a huge way.

I met with parents who had lost children to addiction. They come to Todd's organization, Racing for Recovery. They find support there, and they help other parents to work through this.

I met law enforcement officers there who are working with this recovery facility to try to ensure that the people whom they are locking up aren't going to just get right back into the revolving door again, back in and out of prison, back committing crimes. The No. 1 cause of crime in the State of Ohio is this addiction; people who, again, put the drug first ahead of everything, including their own sense and their own conscience, their own sense of what is moral and right, and instead they are committing burglaries and fraud and shoplifting--anything they can do to get the funds they need to continue their addiction.

I met Jessica at Racing for Recovery. She has been clean for 9 months. Before she sought help, she overdosed for 3 days in a row. She said her life was saved by the police; specifically, a program by the Lucas County Police Department called the Drug Abuse Response Team, DART. I am really impressed with DART and what they are doing. It is now being copied in other communities around Ohio and around the country. DART is being proactive. They got her engaged in treatment and recovery. She is now in sober housing. Todd, Jessica, and others there told me this: Look, you have to have this longer term recovery because that is what works.

A couple of weeks ago, during the State work period, I held a roundtable discussion in Fremont, OH, where I met Matt Bell. Matt is an amazing guy--a charismatic, young guy. He said that for him the gateway drug was marijuana and alcohol in high school. He ended up overdosing on heroin three times. He was convicted of 13 felonies, and he went to detox 28 times. Now he is clean and preventing new addictions from taking place by working nonstop to raise public awareness about the dangers of drug use. He goes around to the schools, and he doesn't just talk to kids who are juniors and seniors. He talks to middle schoolers because he knows he has to go younger and younger to get kids to think about their own futures, about the fact that addiction can happen in one use sometimes, and it is something that can ruin their lives. Thank God for Todd and thank God for Matt, because guys like that are out there every day giving back and they are saving lives.

So I want to thank all these compassionate people I have met--Clean Acres, Racing for Recovery, the Lucas County DART team, and Team Recovery. They are doing the hard work. They are in the trenches trying to actually turn the tide on this growing addiction problem we have. Again, I want to tell them that help is on the way.

Last year Congress did pass the 21st Century Cures Act and authorized

funding for States--$500 million this year and $500 million for next year--to fight this epidemic. Another step we took, which I think was probably the biggest step we have taken in a couple of decades in this area, was the passage of the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, or the CARA Act. Those who know about CARA know that it is a new approach on treatment, recovery, and prevention. If you don't know about it, look it up and check it out. Be sure that the groups in your town, wherever you live, know about the fact that they can apply for grant money to be able to help on these recovery services that I am talking about, many of which do not have the funding to be able to be successful without the increases in rehab. Be sure they know about the fact that if you have a fire department in your community that is strapped for cash and cannot afford the Narcan to provide the Narcan treatments, there is an opportunity to apply for grants there, too, to be able to save lives from overdoses. Narcan is not the answer. The answer is to get into treatment. But Narcan is saving lives, and, therefore, it is necessary today. So let people know that is around and is available now.

Sadly, the situation is not getting better, even with these new efforts that are finally being implemented by the new administration. They started at the end of the Obama administration with a couple of programs, and now we have a couple more programs coming on line. Within the next few months, we expect the rest of the programs to be fully implemented. They are absolutely necessary, but they are pushing up against something new, which is, I hate to say, even more dangerous than heroin, and that is this synthetic heroin that is coming into our communities. It is like a poison coming into our communities by the U.S. mail system, if you can believe it.

The experts tell us that most of this fentanyl or carfentanil is being made in laboratories overseas, mostly in China, and it has been coming through the mail system. Why? Because the traffickers don't want to use other private carriers--UPS or FedEx or others--because they require that there be advanced digital information on where the package is from, what is in it, and where it is going. Guess what. We don't require that in the mail system. So the bad guys choose to send it through the mail system instead. That certainly is something the Federal Government should address.

So we have introduced legislation called the STOP Act. It is very simple. It says that if you want to send something to the United States of America, it has to say where it is from--what place in China--what is in the package, where it is going, and it can only go to the place they say it is going. That gives our law enforcement a new tool they are desperate to have because they are not able to look at millions of packages. But they can look at hundreds and this helps them to ferret out those packages that look most suspicious.

By the way, this new stuff, fentanyl and carfentanil, is incredibly powerful and incredibly dangerous. It is believed to be 30 to 50 times more powerful than heroin. Think about that. I was in Dayton, OH, a week before last and was meeting with the law enforcement task force there. They told me the sad story about a little girl, 14 years old, who was told by her friends: You ought to snort this stuff; it is called heroin. She did. It was fentanyl, and she dropped dead. She overdosed and died immediately because it was so powerful. Even a few flakes of it, they say, can kill you.

According to the Cleveland medical examiner of Cleveland, OH, this past month of February, which is the shortest month in the year, was also the deadliest month in Northeast Ohio for fentanyl and heroin. In other words, what they are seeing is not just more overdoses but more deaths because of fentanyl being mixed with heroin or sometimes fentanyl in its pure form. In just 28 days this February, 60 Clevelanders died from overdoses in one month. This is one city in America. There are another seven cases that are undergoing tests, but they are suspected to be the result of heroin and fentanyl overdoses.

What is driving the growth of this epidemic is the increasing use of fentanyl. Drug traffickers are lacing other drugs with it. I was told by the DART task force in Toledo that they are actually putting fentanyl in marijuana now, and people are showing up in the emergency room and overdosing on marijuana because it is sprinkled with fentanyl. It is more addictive. So the traffickers like it. It is more deadly. So we need to fight back. The Drug Enforcement Administration says it takes 2 milligrams of fentanyl to kill you. That is about the same as a pinch of salt. Many heroin users don't realize that the heroin they buy on the street may contain these new incredibly powerful synthetic drugs. So part of the message has to be what one father told me, which is: You are playing Russian roulette every time you use these drugs because you don't know what is in it. If there is fentanyl in it, there is a good chance you won't just overdose, but you will end up as one of these statistics we talked about earlier.

In Lorain, OH, last Monday, a 29-year-old man drove off the road and nearly hit a tree. When police arrived they found him unconscious from an overdose, with a baby in the backseat--a baby in the backseat. It took several doses of this Narcan and naloxone to reverse the effects of the overdose. Ordinarily, it would take only one dose, but with fentanyl-laced heroin it takes more. When police went to his home, a child answered the door and said: Mommy is sleeping, and we can't wake her up. Again, this is the guy that overdosed in the car. They take the kid home and another kid says: Mommy won't wake up. They find out the mother is also unconscious from a heroin overdose that she had in front of her four children. According to police, the couple thought they were using heroin, but tests confirm that it was laced with fentanyl.

This is an opportunity for us in the Congress to pass legislation that will help to be able to stop some of this poison from coming into our communities. At a minimum, it will raise the price, because some of this fentanyl, I am told, is less expensive than even the things that are less powerful, like heroin.

Fentanyl took the life of Erin Jarvis of Troy, OH. Erin was a prom queen. Erin was very popular. She was active in student government. She was captain of her soccer team. She got good grades. She got into Ohio University, a great school.

She had multiple knee injuries from playing soccer, which required surgery. She was prescribed Percocet. She became addicted. At Ohio University, her friend introduced her to a drug that was stronger and cheaper and easier to get. Of course, that was heroin. This story I have heard so many times. There is the overprescribing, sometimes because of an accident and an injury, and, then, somebody becomes addicted and turns to heroin because it is cheaper and easier to get. Erin began disappearing for days at a time, stealing from her family. Her mom Kelly started missing jewelry, credit cards, and even a TV set. When her sister got her wisdom teeth taken out, she stole her sister's Percocet. By the way, she never should have gotten Percocet for her wisdom teeth, in my view.

Erin finally got help. She went to rehab. She decided she wanted to become a nurse and help others struggling with addiction. After receiving treatment, she moved back in with her mom. But she relapsed, and she died. She died at the age of 24 with this promising life ahead of her. Her last words to her mom were these: I love you. The next day Kelly watched her daughter get taken out of their home in a body bag.

Tests showed that Erin died of an overdose of heroin laced with fentanyl. According to the coroner, she hadn't used the full injection. There was a lot left in the needle. He said: I suspect that what was in that syringe was not what she thought it was--exactly.

Families who have loved ones struggling with addiction are worried about the poison pouring into the streets, and you can see why. As deadly as heroin is, this stuff is even worse.

To keep this poison off the streets, Senator Klobuchar, Senator Rubio, Senator Hassan, and I have introduced bipartisan legislation, the Synthetic Trafficking and Overdose Prevention Act, or the STOP Act, which would require the Postal Service to require this simple information that would give our law enforcement the ability to target these packages of fentanyl.

Based on expert testimony in hearings we have had hearings before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, it would make it easier for them to detect those packages. That is what law enforcement is asking for. We should provide it to them. There is a bill in the House that is identical to ours, introduced by Congressman Pat Tiberi of Ohio and Congressman Richard Neal of Massachusetts.

This is not the silver bullet, as I said. It is not the solution. No one has that silver bullet, but it would take away a key tool of drug traffickers and restrict the supply of these drugs, raising their price and making it harder to get. With the threat of this synthetic heroin and this poison coming into our communities every day, we need to act and act now.

So I would urge my colleagues to let their constituents know about the help that is on the way. Tell them about what is going on with the Cures Act and CARA legislation. Put it on your website so they know they can get help with treatment and recovery that was not previously out there. Our law enforcement, first responders, and firefighters can get the help they need to be able to get the training and have the funds for Narcan to save lives. We can do much better in terms of prevention and education. Some of this grant money is directed toward letting people know the connection between prescription drugs and heroin and between fentanyl and heroin.

Finally, to my colleagues, please join us in pushing back against these new poisons coming into our communities by cosponsoring the STOP Act and by requiring that this basic information be provided. With more cosponsors, I think our leadership will be much more likely to take this to the floor. Once it gets to the floor, it can be passed because people know that in their communities all over this country this epidemic must be stopped.

Thank you, Madam President.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 10 minutes or 15 minutes.

Mr. President, I rise today to discuss the effort by my Republican colleagues, including the President, to dismantle the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Executive order and roll back protections for workers.

For too long, many workers in this country have been subject to dangerous working conditions, wage theft, discrimination, and harassment. While most companies follow the law and play by the rules, a few have cut corners at the expense of workers' rights and safety and have factored in paying penalties as just another cost of doing business. That is not fair for workers, and it is not fair for the businesses that play by the rules. It is time we put a stop to it.

We certainly should not be spending taxpayers' dollars to pay Federal contractors who violate--and sometimes repeatedly violate--Federal labor laws. Repeated violations by Federal contractors is a serious problem.

According to a 2013 HELP Committee staff report, 49 government contractors accounted for 1,776 Federal labor law violations. We are talking about things like an unsafe workplace, discriminating against workers, or failing to pay workers what they earned. Understand when I talk about unsafe workplaces, I am talking about fatalities. But despite these widespread violations, these companies continue to receive taxpayer-funded Federal contracts worth $81 billion a year.

My colleagues may have seen a recent Politico Magazine report on VT Halter. VT Halter is a major Navy shipbuilder, but its safety track record is deeply concerning. In 2009, two workers were killed and five others injured--some severely--when an explosion occurred at a VT Halter shipyard. A month later, they received an $87 million Federal contract. About 6 months after the explosion, VT Halter settled charges relating to the explosion, admitting that they had willfully violated at least 12 Occupational Safety and Health Administration--or OSHA-- workplace safety rules to prevent incidents like this from occurring-- an incident in which two workers died. They willfully violated-- willfully; that is willfully violated.

That explosion wasn't VT Halter's only incident. In 2009, a worker fell to his death at another VT Halter shipyard where there were no handrails or fall protections. In 2012, the company was fined by OSHA after a worker at a VT Halter shipyard was killed when the lid on a pressurized pot exploded. They were fined again in 2014 for violating crane safety rules after two cranes tipped over, injuring five workers, including one 63-year-old worker who now has the mental capacity of a child.

It doesn't make sense to keep rewarding companies like this with lucrative contracts when they repeatedly--and, again, willfully-- disregard basic safety protections.

To address this problem, in 2014 President Obama issued an Executive order that essentially says that if you have repeatedly broken our labor laws, the Federal Government will need to examine a company's compliance record on labor law violations before awarding large taxpayer-funded government contracts. Companies with poor track records will need to prove they are taking action to make sure that these types of egregious labor law violations don't happen again.

In addition to cracking down on repeat violators who bid for Federal contracts, the President's Executive order also includes two other important provisions that I support: a requirement that companies give workers a pay stub each pay period and a provision to make sure workers are able to access justice if they have been wronged.

As the Presiding Officer may know, employers are required, under the Fair Labor Standards Act, to accurately report the number of hours an employee works and their pay. But, surprisingly, employers are not always required to give this information to an employee on a pay stub each pay period. This matters. This matters because when a bad actor cheats its employees by undercounting hours or underpaying wages, it is a lot harder for an employee to recover damages if they don't get a pay stub.

It is often low-income workers who work variable shifts who are most easily exploited in these cases. For example, last year, a group of janitors in the

Twin Cities won hundreds of thousands of dollars of back pay because their employer had miscounted their hours. And because most of them weren't given pay stubs, it took them much longer to discover that they had been underpaid. One of their key demands, in addition to being paid fairly, was that they start getting pay stubs to ensure they don't get cheated again. This seems to me like a sensible thing to ask.

Let's be clear. Most employers already give their employees pay stubs, so this requirement isn't a big change for them, but it makes a big difference for the workers who are most vulnerable to wage theft. And because this provision has already been implemented, repealing it will have real and obvious consequences for working families.

The fair pay and safe workplaces rule also took an important step toward protecting workers' fundamental rights by banning the use of forced arbitration in cases of discrimination or sexual assault and harassment. As we have seen in a multitude of contexts in recent years, corporate America is increasingly preventing its employees or customers from accessing the court, relying instead on forced arbitration to avoid accountability when people seek justice for being cheated or mistreated. And some of the most egregious cases we have heard are from workers whose rights have been viciously violated and whose cases were forced into the dark.

I have made it a priority during my time in the Senate to combat the widespread and harmful use of forced arbitration. In fact, the forced arbitration regulations within the fair pay and safe workplaces rule build on an effort that I successfully championed 8 years ago.

I first became interested in the issue after learning that major Department of Defense contractors charged with performing vital national security functions were using arbitration to sweep cases of sexual assault and harassment under the rug. I heard stories of women who were assaulted or subjected to hostile working conditions while employed by a DOD contractor. And when those women sought justice for the actions--or inactions--of their employers, they were forced into secret arbitration where none of the traditional safeguards of a public court of law apply. As a result, countless other victims were left in the dark about the women's cases, and the contractors were shielded from accountability, both from the courts and from the public eye.

So in 2009, I introduced an amendment to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act that prevented certain DOD contractors from forcing their employees to arbitrate claims of discrimination or sexual assault and harassment. The amendment passed with bipartisan support. In the years since, it continues to be passed on a bipartisan basis as a part of the Defense appropriations process each year, most recently in December of 2014.

Now, it is unclear to me what has changed in the years since we passed my amendment that would make my Republican colleagues shift course. But what is clear is that now is not the time to roll back these critical protections for our workers.

According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, at least 25 percent of American women say they have experienced sexual harassment in the workplace. And recent high profile revelations about abuse--for example, former Fox News chairman Roger Ailes' abuse of his employees, as well as the allegations of sex bias at Kay and Sterling Jewelers-- demonstrate that we are far from addressing this issue on a broader scale. So I urge my Republican colleagues to reconsider their support for this resolution. I urge them to not force vulnerable women who have been wronged into the dark and into forced arbitration.

Blocking the fair pay and safe workplaces rule is just wrongheaded. A vote to repeal this rule is a vote to support giving taxpayer dollars to companies that break the law, it is a vote to help employers who cheat their employees out of fair pay, and it is a vote to take away workers' fundamental rights to access to the court.

I urge a ``no'' vote, and I thank the Presiding Officer for the generous window of 10 to 15 minutes.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Wow, I kind of hit it right on the nail. Am I out of order now saying that? No? Good. That means I have another minute and a half.

I thank the Presiding Officer.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I come to the floor this afternoon to talk about the affordable housing crisis in the United States of America and to talk about the reintroduction of legislation from last Congress that is going to be reintroduced by me, Senator Hatch, Senator Wyden, Senator Heller, Senator Schumer, Senator Murkowski, and the Acting President pro tempore--Senator Young--and several other of our colleagues.

The reason we are introducing this important legislation is to say that we need to increase the tax credit for affordable housing in the United States. We are saying this because we know from reports and statistics that we have a housing crisis in the United States of America, and unless we increase the affordable housing tax credit, we are not going to see much more new supply. That is because 90 percent of the affordable housing that is built in the United States of America is built with a tax credit.

Today, we are also releasing a report that is showing that the demand for affordable housing is exploding and construction is definitely not keeping pace. We are showing that seniors and veterans are at a greater risk for homelessness and that about a 60-percent increase in the need for affordable housing is being driven by Americans who are paying more than 50 percent of their income in rent, making it an unaffordable situation.

We are introducing this important legislation that, we hope, will build 400,000 additional affordable housing units across the United States and that will also help create additional jobs.

This is an issue that we are sending to the Finance Committee before, and I would hope my colleagues on the Finance Committee would take swift action. I say that because the report found three key factors. One is an increase of 9 million renters since 2005. That is a huge increase since 2005. How did we get there?

Over 7 million Americans lost their homes due to foreclosure in the economic crisis. As a result, home ownership rates have been at their lowest levels since the mid-1960s. Over the last 10 years, we have seen the largest gain in the number of renters in any 10-year period of time on record. That is right. We increased the number of renters in this last 10-year period of time more than at any other time on the books.

It kind of makes sense if you think about it. If the economic crisis caused you to downsize, and you were in a home and you could no longer afford it,

you would put pressure on the rental market. For those already in the rental market, it pushed many of them out of market-based rates and into solutions that were less affordable. As we all know, in major cities and urban areas across our country, it caused an actual homelessness crisis, as well, as many people could no longer even afford basic rent.

The affordable housing crisis is exploding all over the country, and we face pressures from all sides. Demand for rental housing has increased by 21 percent, but we are building units at the lowest rate since 1970. It does not take more than basic economics to see that, with demand so high and supply so low, we need to do something if we are going to make a dent in this problem. If we do not increase the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, then, by the year 2025, we are going to have 15 million Americans who are spending more than half of their income on rent, and this is truly unacceptable.

Our report shows that in the last decade the total number of Americans who have faced this extreme housing problem--that is, paying more than half of their incomes in rent--ballooned by 60-percent, and that has put a lot of pressure on many of our States. For my home State, the affordability crisis is actually getting worse than the national average. Since 2000, median rents have risen by 7.6 percent, which is 2.5 percent higher than in the rest of the country. As I said, it is all of those people coming from the foreclosure market into the rental market. On average, there is about a 3.5-percent increase in rents across the United States. In addition, there are 16 percent fewer affordable rental homes available in Washington State compared to the U.S. average. Overall, 400,000 Washingtonians are paying more than half of their monthly incomes in rent.

We saw these numbers, and we saw specifically how seniors and veterans and homelessness are also driving the increase in demand. Senior unaffordability, which is the term given to people who are paying more than half of their incomes in rent, rose by 30 percent. With the veteran unaffordability, which is the number of the veterans who are returning and being part of the housing market, we will see an increase of over 500,000 veterans who need affordable housing.

I think the Acting President pro tempore knows well that in his home State there are people who are trying to provide solutions in small towns and urban areas for our veterans so that they can have affordable places to live. The report also shows that doing nothing is going to continue to exacerbate the problem. We will see another 25-percent increase in unaffordability. That is just unacceptable.

To help solve the problem of affordable housing, my colleague, the chairman of the Finance Committee, and I are reintroducing the bipartisan Affordable Housing Credit Improvement Act to strengthen and expand the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit.

Under this provision, the expanded tax credit would help create and preserve 1.3 million affordable homes over a 10-year period of time, which would be an increase of 400,000 new units nationwide. According to the National Association of Home Builders, annual LIHTC development--this is the overall appropriation--supports approximately 95,700 jobs and $9.1 billion in wages. Investing in the low-income housing tax credit, which gives our citizens more affordable housing, is good for them, but it is also good for our economy. Enacting the proposal would create an additional 450,000 jobs over the next 10 years and would support the construction of these important units.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter from the National Association of Home Builders that talks about the economic benefit of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit and this particular proposal, with their estimates of increased Federal revenue of $11.4 billion, State and local revenue of $5.6 billion, and a total of 452,000 jobs being created in that 10-year period of time.

Mr. President, I enter that into the Record because it is so important for our colleagues not to get stymied over the next several months, as we discuss proposals for economic development and for infrastructure across the United States, and not take action on this issue because we do not know how we can afford it. What we cannot afford is the rising number of Americans who no longer can afford rent or home ownership. What we need to do is to make sure that there is a roof over their heads and that they can be productive parts of our economy.

Since its creation over the last 30 years, this tax credit has financed nearly 2.9 million homes across the United States, leveraging more than $100 billion in private sector investment. That is what I like most--a little bit of the tax credit going a long way to leverage the private sector into making investments in affordable housing. Between 1986 and 2013, more than 13 million people have lived in homes that have been financed by this tax credit.

I hope my colleagues will take a look at this legislation that we are introducing today and help us support it. The crisis is real across America. Our report shows the crisis is only going to be exacerbated because of demographics and demand. The best way out of this problem is for us to make an investment that only we can make, as 90 percent of the affordable homes are built with the tax credit. Without increasing the tax credit by 50 percent, we are just writing our own statistics for a very, very dire situation across the United States of America.

I see communities in my State that look like and reflect pictures that I have seen from the Great Depression. I know the recession hit us hard, but we have to climb out of this homelessness problem by making an investment in the affordable housing tax credit. It is a bipartisan success. I hope we can make its expansion a bipartisan solution that we all can get behind.

I thank the Acting President pro tempore.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 15 minutes.

Madam President, the 115th Congress has now been in session for 2 months. Republicans control the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House. So what have they done so far with that power? Have they passed legislation to create jobs or increase wages for middle-class families? No. Have they proposed any plan to put Americans back to work fixing our roads, bridges, and other crumbling infrastructure? No. Have they done anything at all to help seniors who are struggling with high drug prices and other expenses? Not even close.

During his campaign, President Trump said over and over that he would stand up for workers. But so far, Republicans haven't voted on a single piece of legislation to help working families put food on the table, send their kids to college, or save a little money for retirement. No, they haven't helped families, but they have been busy.

With no hearings and barely any debate, Republicans have found a new tool, one that has been used successfully only once before in history, under the Congressional Review Act. They have used it to kill basic protections for workers. No wonder they haven't wanted any headlines about the actual work they are getting done.

Senate Republicans want to repeal the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Executive order. So instead of creating jobs or raising wages, they are trying to make it easier for companies that get big-time, taxpayer- funded government contracts to steal wages from their employees and injure their workers without admitting responsibility.

The American people spend around $500 billion every year on private companies that provide goods and services to the government. Those companies do everything from building battleships and fighter jets to serving snacks at national parks. It is big business. It is estimated that as many as one in five American workers works for a company with at least one Federal contract.

With so much taxpayer money on the line, it really matters that contractors are using it responsibly. While many contractors are good employers, others cut corners on safety or squeeze their workers on wages and benefits just to keep their corporate profits going up, and they break Federal labor laws to do so. Here are just two examples.

VT Halter Marine is a company that builds ships for the Navy. They have received $680 million in Federal contracts since 2009--taxpayer dollars that were supposed to be used to create good, safe jobs. Instead, VT Halter took a lot of shortcuts on worker safety, and now they have killed or injured multiple workers at their shipyards in Mississippi.

In 2012, a worker died after the lid of a 20-pound cast iron pot containing abrasive ship-cleaning liquid came loose and sheared away his face. Investigations showed that VT Halter had ignored safety requirements to show employees how to safely handle these pots.

In 2014, a crane collapsed at VT Halter, injuring five workers, including a crane operator, who lost part of his skull, is now blind, and requires 24-hour nursing care. That employee had repeatedly told his supervisors that the sensors on his crane were broken, but VT Halter kept him working, and now he is blind and needs full-time nursing care.

The list goes on and on. Each time, VT Halter ignored the law, workers got hurt or killed, and the company got a slap on the wrist and another top-dollar defense contract courtesy of the American taxpayer.

Contractors that cannot meet basic safety standards should not get a single dollar of taxpayer money, and the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Executive order was the first step in making sure that this was the case.

Other Federal contractors have found other ways to take advantage of their workers and to boost profits. Federal contractors have been caught stealing wages from hundreds of thousands of workers. Right here in the Senate, the men and women who prepare the food in the cafeteria have had their wages stolen by the contractor that employs them. The Department of Labor just found out that hundreds of these hard-working employees together were owed more than $1 million in back wages. This case was right under our noses. There are countless more all across the country where the very companies that receive taxpayer money from the government are taking shortcuts, breaking the law, cheating their employees out of hard-earned wages, and driving working families into poverty.

Republicans in the House of Representatives have called this rule ``a solution in search of a problem,'' saying it would ``only hurt workers and small businesses,'' as if the deaths of those working for Federal contractors or the thefts of their wages was just business as usual and they didn't care. That position is parroted by the chamber of commerce, which calls the rule ``burdensome'' and ``unwarranted.''

My Republican colleagues and their buddies in the giant corporations that rely on huge Federal contracts to keep profits high want the American people to believe that by making it easier for companies that mistreat their workers to profit off of taxpayer dollars, somehow they are helping workers. That is just nuts.

Here is what the rule does: When a company wants a contract from the government that is worth more than $500,000, it has to disclose any judgments against it for violating labor laws for the preceding 3 years. The order also asks the Secretary of Labor to work with other agencies to come up with standards for assessing whether labor violations are serious, repeated, or willful.

If you are a company that does right by your workers, this rule will not affect you--not one bit. If you pay your workers fairly and keep them safe on the job, you won't even notice the new rule. It also does not stop companies from getting contracts if they have had just a few violations but have taken steps to remedy the problem, and it does not add one bit to the burden on smaller companies that bid on smaller contracts--again, not one bit.

So who gets hit by this rule? Who is it who is complaining? Who are the Republicans trying to protect? Massive corporations that repeatedly cut corners that put their employees' lives at risk or that steal their wages. This rule keeps the big corporations that are the biggest labor violators from getting the biggest contracts.

Once again, this debate is about whom Congress actually works for. Does Washington work for the taxpayers, who want to see their hard- earned money spent responsibly? Do we work for the hard-working Americans, who want to be paid what they are promised and not have to put their lives at risk for a paycheck? Do we work for giant contractors that rake in enormous tax dollars and cannot even follow basic safety rules for American workers?

I came to Washington to stand with the men and women who go to work every day to build roads and bridges, to help communities recover from natural disasters, and to provide healthcare to our veterans. I think that is what we are here for. But the Republican majority wants to stand up for giant corporations that put workers at risk. They want to stand up against good, safe, well-paying jobs. That is their priority in the new Congress. If they succeed, it will be the American taxpayers and the American workers who quite literally pay the price.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, over the years, Congress has enacted laws to make workplaces safer and fairer and to raise wages for American workers. These laws protect American workers. These laws make America more productive. And these laws help to preserve good, safe, middle-class jobs.

The Fair Labor Standards Act introduced the 40-hour workweek, established a national minimum wage, and guaranteed time-and-a-half for overtime. The Occupational Safety and Health Act ensures that employers keep the workplace free from hazards like toxic chemicals, excessive noise levels, mechanical dangers, or unsanitary conditions. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination by employers because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The American with Disabilities Act prohibits unjustified discrimination based on disability. The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 requires affirmative action to employ qualified individuals With disabilities. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act forbids employment discrimination against older workers. The Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act requires equal opportunity and affirmative action for veterans. The Equal Pay Act addressed wage disparities based on gender. The Family and Medical Leave Act requires covered employers to provide employees job-protected unpaid leave for qualified medical and family reasons. The Davis-Bacon Act requires paying the local prevailing wages on public works projects. And the National Labor Relations Act protects the rights of private sector employees to organize into trade unions, engage in collective bargaining for better terms and work conditions, and take collective action including strike if necessary. These laws are already on the books. It is already against the law for Federal contractors to violate them. The obligation to comply with basic workplace protections applies to employers, whether they are government contractors or not and that obligation will remain in force regardless of what Congress does on the rule today.

At issue today is a rule that simply requires contractors to share information about their history of compliance with workplace protections in the last 3 years before getting a Federal contract. The rule does not impose any new compliance obligations on government contractors.

It has long been a tenet of Federal Government contracting that it is better to contract with responsible contractors that abide by the law, including labor laws. It also furthers economy and efficiency. Many studies find a strong correlation between labor law compliance and performance. One study found that from 2005 to 2009, one quarter of the companies that committed the top workplace violations and later received Federal contracts had significant performance problems on their contracts. It is not surprising that employers that abide by the law also do a better job on their contracts.

In the mid-1990s, however, the Government Accountability Office, then known as the General Accounting Office, found that the Government had awarded Federal contracts worth more than $60 billion to companies that had violated the National Labor Relations Act or the Occupational Safety and Health Act. More than 10 years later, the GAO found that the pattern continued. GAO found that almost two-thirds of the largest wage-and-hour violations and almost 40 percent of the largest workplace health-and-safety penalties issued between 2005 and 2009 were made against companies that went on to receive new Government contracts. Between 2007 and 2012, 49 Federal contractors responsible for large violations of

Federal labor laws were forced to pay more than $91 million in back wages.

To help address this problem, in August of last year, the Department of Defense, the General Services Administration, and NASA jointly issued the rule that we are talking about today. The rule amended the Federal Acquisition Regulation to implement Executive Order 13,673 on Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces. That Executive order was designed to increase efficiency and cost savings in Federal contracting by increasing contractor compliance with labor laws. At the same time last August, the Department of Labor issued guidance to help Federal agencies implement the Executive Order and the rule.

The rule also prohibited companies with contracts larger than $1 million from denying employees who are the victims of sexual assault, sexual harassment, or discrimination their day in court by forcing them to arbitrate these claims.

The rule helps to provide a level playing field for businesses that play by the rules. By requiring disclosure of violations, it encourages contractors to pay fair wages and provide safe workplaces. The rule helps to ensure that the government awards Federal contracts and the taxpayer dollars that fund them to responsible employers that comply with workplace safety laws, antidiscrimination laws, sexual harassment laws, and minimum wage and overtime laws. Without the rule, millions of taxpayer dollars would go to businesses that break these laws.

After my home State of Maryland implemented a living wage standard for contractors, the average number of bids for State contracts actually increased by nearly 30 percent. Nearly half of contractors interviewed by the State government said that the new standards encouraged them to bid, because the standards leveled the playing field.

Under the Federal rule, prospective contractors report the information themselves. The vast majority of contractors adhere to labor laws. If a prospective contractor does not have any violations, it simply checks a box.

Companies that do business with the government employ one in five Americans, so this rule improves the lives of millions of workers.

In September of last year, Donald Trump delivered a speech on jobs at the New York Economic Club. In that speech, Mr. Trump advocated what he called ``a new policy of Americanism.'' ``Under this American System,'' Mr. Trump said, ``every policy decision we make must pass a simple test: Does it create more jobs and better wages for Americans?'' The rule at issue today passes that test. It helps to create better wages for Americans. And repealing the rule would flunk the test that Mr. Trump laid out last year. Nonetheless, once again the Republican majority seeks to employ the blunt instrument of the Congressional Review Act to repeal that rule today.

Some critics label the Fair Pay rule as a ``blacklisting'' rule. But the rule does not require a contracting officer to deny any contract based on a history of labor violations. The rule simply provides information to contracting officers to help them make decisions that about whether a contractor is responsible. The goal of the rule is to encourage companies to come into compliance--not to bar them.

Enacting this Congressional Review Act disapproval resolution could effectively stop any new rules on the disclosure of labor law violations or the consideration of labor law violations as a requirement for Federal procurement contracts. Enacting this resolution will send the wrong message to companies who are tempted to skirt the law. And enacting this resolution will make it more likely that Federal dollars once again go to law-breaking contractors.

This resolution goes in the wrong direction, and thus I oppose it.