Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Arkansas (Mr. Hill) for his years of bipartisan work that went into this bill.

I am proud to support this bill today because I believe that it will strengthen the ability of investors to make informed decisions. Exchange-traded funds are valuable and popular tools for investors to diversify risks and returns through a single security at low cost. This bill will help investors understand the various ETF choices on the market.

I was proud that the House passed our bill, H.R. 910, earlier this Congress by a vote of 405-2. This bill is essentially the same bill and incorporates, among other things, an amendment by Senator Elizabeth Warren to reiterate that the safe harbor will not be available to affiliates of the ETF, including the fund's registered investment adviser. I am really proud of the bipartisanship that went into this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support this bill, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I, again, thank my colleague from Arkansas (Mr. Hill) for working with us on this bill over the past years and look forward to it now being sent to the President's desk and signed into law.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, my amendment highlights the need to think about our future workforce and how it will change because of technology and to encourage the Bureau of Labor Statistics to accept a wider and more forward-looking range of inputs into its range of projections for its workforce of the future.

I co-chair the New Democrat Coalition Future of Work Task Force with my colleagues, Congressman Seth Moulton and Congressman Jared Polis. Congressman Jim Himes, the chair of the New Dem Coalition, has been active in the task force work and joins me in cosponsoring this amendment today.

Over the course of several months, the task force has held a series of forums to hear from experts on various areas that will require this body's attention in the coming years and decades. We have heard from historians, economists, and policy experts about how technological revolutions of the past have impacted social and political institutions and how lessons from those experiences and from current conditions can help us prepare for the future.

We have also heard from labor and business leaders who are pioneering the way they attract talent, retain their services, and develop skills for the increasingly rapidly change economy. It is nearly unanimous among our experts that the economy will change significantly and change faster, but it is less clear just how quickly the workforce will need to adapt.

For decades, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been doing excellent and invaluable work to track our labor trends, and its projections have been proven very reliable and useful--to business and to our educators--in times of slower and relatively predictable technological development.

However, they are based on historical data and historical trends, and some of the anticipated changes in technology--such as robotics, self- driving vehicles, and artificial intelligence--could fundamentally change our economy in ways that haven't been seen before. So, in its current form, the way the Bureau calculates and estimates future development of the workforce may not be able to capture the dramatic changes that our future holds.

One panel convened by the task force suggested that it would be impossible to do projections in any single way to predict the workforce, but that, with additional resources, the Bureau of Labor Statistics could model for a variety of scenarios of different rates of technological change in different areas.

My amendment increases the BLS account by a dollar and decreases it by a dollar, and I intend it to mean that the BLS should submit to Congress an estimate of the resources it would need to make a range of forward-looking estimates, including consultation with those industries that are driving this rapid technological change and those that will be affected by that change to account for the increasing rate of technological job displacement.

It is hard to estimate by backward-looking extrapolations how the changes from self-driving cars and vehicles or artificial intelligence will affect the real jobs of the future.

Technological changes in the workforce are not new. The industrial revolution and the automation of agriculture transformed the way work was performed in our country and significantly improved, on the whole, our standard of living over time.

The results have not been uniform for all communities and all populations. Those transformations typically played out over generations, so our social and political institutions had ample time to respond. But today, development and deployment of technology is far more rapid, and Congress, business, and our educational system need the best possible data to evaluate policy proposals and to produce the workforce training needed for future employees and to develop educational curricula to ensure that our economy works for everyone.

Like in the industrial revolution, technological development presents the opportunity for a greatly improved standard of living, but it will also bring challenges to our workforce. Businesses, communities, and the government must work together.

Additional considerations in the projections made by the BLS will help Congress to anticipate these changes and to weigh proposed solutions. Objective projections based on empirical evidence are crucial to a debate that will be based on our different views of the role of government and its relationship with market forces. Those are the differences that should shape our ideas for helping Americans enjoy prosperous and full lives in the future.

I urge my colleagues to join me and vote ``yes'' on my amendment to begin to establish a range of scenarios for the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the future world that we will inhabit.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, as you know, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2018 tasks the Missile Defense Agency with developing a space-based ballistic missile intercept layer.

There is no doubt that a space-based missile defense, if it is technologically feasible and economically justifiable, would make an important contribution to our national security. So would the Star Trek transporter or the warp drive, but as a scientist and, in fact, the only Ph.D. scientist in the U.S. Congress, I think that we need to do our homework before investing hundreds of billions of dollars into attempting to develop this system. As such, my amendment would prohibit the use of funds to attempt to develop a space-based missile intercept layer.

It has been more than 30 years since President Reagan called for defending the United States against a first strike by developing a strategic defense system, commonly known as Star Wars.

The idea of a space-based version of this has gone in and out of fashion for the last 30 years, but every time this space-based concept has been looked at by technologically competent outside experts, it was deemed to be unworkable, impossibly expensive, vulnerable to countermeasures, easy for an opponent to destroy, easy to overwhelm with a small number of enemy missiles, or all of the above. This approach was judged technologically unworkable in

1983, and the status quo has not changed.

In order to reach a ballistic missile during the first few minutes of flight, a large number of interceptors must be stationed in low- altitude orbit. A report conducted by the American Physical Society in 2003 concluded that in order to ensure full coverage, a fleet of 1,000 or more orbiting satellites would be required to intercept just a single missile.

To put that in perspective, the United States currently has slightly more than 600 satellites in Earth orbit, which includes commercial, scientific, and military satellites. Moreover, the amount of launch that is required to put this material into orbit in a reasonable amount of time would greatly exceed the current U.S. launch capability.

The National Academies of Sciences estimated that it would cost at least $300 billion--in 2003 dollars--for just such a limited capability. And just last year, in his testimony to the House Armed Services Committee, the former Director of the Missile Defense Authority, Admiral Syring, concluded the same thing.

Setting aside the high cost, a space-based missile defense system has inherent vulnerabilities that greatly limit its effectiveness. Even with thousands of interceptors deployed, only a few would be within range to target an incoming missile, and those could be easily overwhelmed by the launch of several missiles from one location. And because interceptors must be stationed in low-altitude orbit, they are easily detected, tracked, and destroyed.

Finally, there is a more fundamental question that we must ask ourselves. And that is: Is it wise to deploy weapons in space, especially when the required technology is becoming widely available around the world?

Deploying such a system would strain strategic relationships around the globe and almost certainly trigger a space arms race.

There is no doubt that ensuring our Nation's defense and national security are of paramount priority, but spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a system which will not work, without having serious debate and at least some concept for how this might be remotely practical or affordable, is indefensible.

Mr. Chairman, I urge my colleagues to join me in voting ``yes'' on my amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, can I inquire how much time I have remaining?

Mr. Chairman, I would like to point out that Ronald Reagan never illuminated the possibility of this to the American public, because the possibility never existed.

What we have today is not a missile defense system. It has failed in the great majority of tests. It has been tested against a very small fraction of the countermeasures that are elementary to deploy against it.

I hope that no one involved in the missile defense system is telling President Trump that we have an effective antimissile system today, because if he gambles counting on any defense from that system, he is putting our country at risk.

Mr. Chairman, I yield the remaining amount of my time to the ranking member.

Mr. Chair, I thank my friend from California (Mr. Takano) and my colleagues, Representatives Esty, Langevin, Lieu, and Lujan for cosponsoring this amendment.

Our amendment would provide $2.5 million to revive the Office of Technology Assessment to provide Congress with unbiased, timely, and nonpartisan reports on a wide range of issues in science and technology.

This office is no less necessary today than when it was first started in 1972, or when it was defunded in 1995. As technology continues to advance at an increasingly rapid pace and our partisan divide seems to grow deeper, Congress needs this now more than ever.

The OTA did important work in a number of areas, but I would like to highlight just one of those areas in particular.

One of the last recommendations the OTA made was that the U.S. should move rapidly to computerized health records and that standards should be put in place to ensure what we now call interoperability.

Had we heeded this advice rather than defunding the OTA, we could have saved hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money and saved hundreds of thousands of American lives by ensuring accurate, up-to- date patient data that was accessible regardless of where the patient turned up for care.

This also could have helped slow or prevent the opioid epidemic by ensuring that patients would not be able to doctor shop to acquire numerous opioid prescriptions.

While we cannot slow down the rapid pace of technology, we can give our country back an important and proven tool.

So I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this amendment to restore this vital source of credible, nonpartisan scientific expertise to the U.S. Congress.

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, my amendment is a symbolic adjustment to the NNSA budget intended to raise awareness about two areas of emerging national security risk that I believe deserve more attention and investment.

As the only Ph.D. physicist in Congress, I feel a special responsibility to speak out on issues of national security, especially when they concern emerging technological threats that Congress may not be sufficiently aware of.

Any student of the history of warfare is well aware of the dangers of fighting the last war, and for more than 70 years, nuclear weapons have held center stage among threats to our national security and global safety because of their unique capabilities to threaten the existence of mankind. That threat remains, but I fear that the balance of our defensive investments do not adequately reflect emerging threats.

We now appear to be in the process of deciding to spend over $1 trillion to upgrade our nuclear weapons despite the fact that our existing systems are far more sufficient to deter any rational actor. There is no adversary of ours who is not intimidated by our nuclear arsenal but who will suddenly fall in line if we add just one more upgrade or additional weapons manufacturing capability. Put simply, another generation of nuclear weapons will not make us significantly safer.

On the other hand, we live in a world where newly emerging and potentially equally great threats loom: first, bioterror, driven by recent breakthroughs in genetic engineering and off-the-shelf biotechnology; and, second, lethal autonomous weapons systems driven by recent breakthroughs in machine vision, facial recognition, and artificial intelligence. These are small, inexpensive lethal drones and similar devices that use machine vision and artificial intelligence to target individuals or groups of humans, potentially without any human involvement in the kill decision.

For those of my colleagues unfamiliar with these technologies, perform an internet search for the term ``lethal autonomous weapons systems,'' sometimes abbreviated ``LAWS''; or read the recent press coverage of the ab initio synthesis of the horsepox virus, a close variant of the smallpox virus that killed millions; then search for the term ``biohacking.''

For more detailed information, I urge my colleagues to request a classified or unclassified briefing on recent studies of these subjects by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Both of these technologies pose unique threats to our national security for two reasons:

The first is because of the small physical footprint of a terror facility based on either of these technologies. Either a bioterror laboratory or a small shop to produce and program small lethal drones could easily fit in a basement or small apartment. There is no radiological signature to detect them as there is with nuclear material.

The second is because of the low cost and general availability of key enabling technological components. The monetary investment necessary for a capable terror facility is in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps less.

The relevant technologies are already in wide use in industry.

Contrast this with the threats of nuclear proliferation, where the multibillion-dollar investment to enrich and separate nuclear fissile material pretty much limits nuclear weapons either to established nation-states or perhaps terrorist organizations with access to fissile material from poorly guarded facilities.

Anyone who is unconvinced that we need to take these emerging threats seriously needs only to look at what happened in cybersecurity. One of the painful lessons we have learned in recent years is that everything evil that can be done with computer viruses has, in fact, been done. In large part, this is because of the low barriers to entry and the difficulty of attributing an attack. Both of these features are shared fully by both bioterror and lethal autonomous weapons systems.

So if we are going to stay ahead of these threats, we need to be strategic about our investments. It is time to reconsider the wisdom of pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into Cold War weapons which contribute negligibly to our national security and past time to consider a much more rapid increase in investments in defensive measures against lethal autonomous weapons systems and against bioterror, because by the time they become a reality, it will be too late to react.

As a leader in technology and innovation, the United States should act now to circumvent any danger these technologies could pose.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I urge my colleagues to support this amendment and to take the time to educate themselves about these emerging threats.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on H.J. Res. 111 to block the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's arbitration rule.

The CFPB is charged with protecting consumers from unfair and abusive behaviors by banks and financial firms. To that end, the CFPB's rules would prohibit provisions requiring that a bank customer surrender the right to participate in class actions.

This practice undermines a consumer's right to be compensated for damages, particularly when they get nickeled and dimed by the fine print in financial contracts.

Class actions often represent the only realistic option for consumers who are ripped off to the tune of a few dozen or a few hundred dollars, and they reduce the burden on the courts by consolidating claims, thereby saving money for both plaintiffs and defendants.

Opponents of the CFPB's rule hope that, by prohibiting the consolidation of claims, they can make potential damages so small that the individual claims are not viable.

Meritorious claims from aggrieved plaintiffs who have suffered actual damages would go uncompensated, and equally importantly, wrongdoers would go unpunished.

I urge my colleagues to stand up for consumers and ensure that they can be fairly compensated by actual damages and wrongdoers punished.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to this amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

As the only physicist in the U.S. Congress, I feel a special responsibility to speak out on the importance of strengthening our global nuclear security architecture. At a time when it is more important than ever for the security of the United States to reinforce international norms against nuclear testing, we are here debating an amendment that would restrict the ability of a key international institution to monitor nuclear weapons, and, in fact, is designed to undercut prospects for either eventual ratification or even continued adherence to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.

The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization Preparatory Commission is tasked with establishing a verification regime to monitor compliance with the comprehensive ban on nuclear explosive testing.

If enacted, this amendment would send the wrong signal to the world, deliberately risking an opening for the resumption of unrestricted nuclear testing by many nations on Earth, which would be a national security disaster for the United States.

During the debate on the Iran nuclear agreement, I received more than a dozen classified briefings, many of them individual classified briefings by our weapons experts who supported the negotiating team. At that time, I spent a lot of time putting myself in the place of a terrorist or proliferating nation, and I came to understand the overwhelming technical advantage that the United States possesses today over both other nuclear states, and any potential proliferation state, because we conducted more than 1,000 nuclear tests from 1945 to 1992, more than all other countries on Earth combined.

Many of those tests were extensively instrumented and have provided us with the ability to accurately computer model and evaluate the performance of nuclear weapons without the risk to safety and to the environment. This is why no official of the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, or any other of our nuclear laboratories have ever called for a resumption of nuclear testing or an unsigning or deprecation of the CTBT, because the moment that other nations begin or resume testing, we lose that crucial advantage.

It seems very odd to me that my Republican colleagues would want other nuclear or nonnuclear states to obtain intellectual property and parity in this matter. Although under this amendment the direct funding for the international monitoring system would nominally remain unscathed, it is difficult to imagine that a significant reduction in U.S. technical and financial support to the CTBTO would not adversely affect the organization's ability to maintain and operate any nuclear monitoring system.

The proposed amendment also seeks to undermine the United States' obligation as a signatory not to conduct nuclear test explosions. If the United States unilaterally declares itself exempt, then other countries are very likely to do the same. In addition, contrary to what the amendment implies, U.N. Security Council Resolution 2310, does not impose any new obligations on the United States. Nothing is mandatory in the U.N. resolution. But repudiating support for the resolution could trigger bad faith in other nations around the world and reduce U.S. legitimacy and leverage that ensures other countries do not test nuclear weapons.

So we should not signal any intention that the United States encourages a return to a more hostile nuclear environment, an environment in which the United States does not condemn nuclear weapons testing but, rather, gives away our position as a country that seeks peace and prosperity for our future.

We have an opportunity to turn political rhetoric into concrete action to curb the global proliferation of nuclear weapons and secure the safety of future generations. From a national security point of view, we must acknowledge that the CTBT locks in an enormous competitive advantage for the United States, one that would be a huge mistake to begin throwing away.

Although the CTBT failed to be ratified by a handful of votes the first time it came up in 1999, as George Shultz, the Secretary of State under President Reagan said: ``You can say that a Senator might have been right to vote against the CTBT when it was first put forward''--in 1999--``and right to vote for it now. Why? Because things have changed.''

And what he meant by that is that stockpiled stewardship works, and that the detection system, both that is maintained by the United States and by the world communities by the CTBTO works as well. Short of ratification, the U.S. support for the CTBTO Preparatory Commission remains essential.

I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the Wilson amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last week.

Built on the prairies of Illinois, under the leadership of its first director, Robert Wilson, this national lab performs cutting-edge research in physics to help us understand the fundamental properties of matter. It is also where I spent most of my career as a high energy particle physicist before I ran for Congress.

The discoveries made in Fermilab's first 50 years will remain in the science textbooks forever. Experiments at Fermilab discovered three of the fundamental components of matter: the bottom quark, the neutrino tau, and the top quark, the heaviest known form of matter.

Unfortunately, the Republican budget proposal of the Trump administration threatens the legacy of Fermilab and national labs and scientific facilities throughout the country.

Mr. Speaker, scientific research is not like highway building that can turn on and off in any given fiscal year. Scientific teams and facilities that take generations to build can be wiped out in a single budget cycle by having their funding cut.

So, Mr. Speaker, I call upon you and your colleagues to show us a budget that will maintain our country's leadership in science and technology, because destroying our scientific facilities is no way to make America great again.

Mr. Chair, I thank Ranking Member Waters for yielding me time and for her leadership on this.

Nine years ago, I was there, in 2008, when our financial system collapsed, as a new Member of Congress, the sole scientist on the Financial Services Committee. And as we surveyed the wreckage of our economy, I wondered how we ever could have gotten into a place like that with our financial system clogged with toxic assets based on trillions of dollars of mortgages that never had any realistic chance of being repaid by their homeowners.

We saw giant banks and trading firms leveraged beyond belief, huge financial corporations so complex that they had thousands of business units that even their CEOs were unaware of, and risk management software that was being ignored, if it existed at all.

How could we have gotten there? But when I look at the CHOICE Act that Republicans are about to ram through on a party-line vote, I understand perfectly how we got there. I see all the same forces of mindless deregulation and free market ideology, an overriding mania for tax cuts for the rich, while stripping financial protection for ordinary American families; the same refusal to learn the lessons of financial history and to replace them with alternative facts that fit their ideology.

Mr. Chair, I urge my colleagues to stand up for working families and protect our economy by opposing this bill today.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I thank my colleague from Arkansas (Mr. Hill) for his years of hard bipartisan work that went into this bill.

I am proud to support this bill today because I believe that it will strengthen the abilities of investors to make informed decisions. This legislation would add transparency in the financial markets that will ultimately benefit consumers.

Exchange-traded funds are valuable and popular tools for investors to get exposure to diversified risk through a single security with low costs. My wife and I use them ourselves. They are, however, like the iPhone, very simple on the outside but incredibly complicated products on the inside. They often can be thoroughly understood only by those with the background and the time to analyze the way the ETF is constructed, as well as each of the underlying securities and the sectors they are targeting.

Retail investors and retirement savers often do not have this time and often do not have the expertise in the markets. High-quality research can help them make informed decisions about which ETFs to invest in, equipping them to make decisions on how to diversify across different sectors and indices.

ETFs are continuously issued, so they present unique potential risks to underwriting broker-dealers under the Federal securities laws.

Generally, the Federal securities laws prohibit a broker-dealer from participating in a securities offering from publishing research 15 days before or 30 days after the issuance for very good reason. This is to prevent research that could hype the security ahead of the offering or try to puff its price afterwards.

ETF pricing, however, reflects a wide variety of data across many issuers and classes of securities. Because they are continuously brought to market, it is necessary to provide a clarification in the law that research is permitted to be published continuously, because they are also continually traded on the exchanges. The antifraud provisions of the securities laws will still apply.

To be clear, this bill does not vitiate any rights of investors or responsibilities of broker dealers with respect to the accuracy and truthfulness of statements. Specifically, section 2(c)(1) provides that the antifraud and antimanipulation provisions of the securities laws are not limited by anything in this bill. Moreover, this applies only to bona fide research, and FINRA can require sales materials to be posted to the public.

Section 2(c)(2) preserves the powers of the SROs to oversee all of the practices of broker-dealers, including the publication of these reports.

Lastly, the bill provides for a statutory safe harbor should the Commission not be able to promulgate a rule in the 270-day period established by the bill. This statutory safe harbor is only available to research on funds that have been reported to the SEC for the last year, ensuring that it is true to the purpose of the bill to provide research to be used by investors for existing securities.

Statutory safe harbors exist elsewhere in the Federal securities laws, most notably section 4(a)(2) of the 1933 Act. A statutory private offering exemption can be perfected without relying on regulation D. In practice, though, that does not happen, and I trust that the SEC will prescribe an appropriate set of rules consistent with section 2(a) of this bill so that the regulatory safe harbor will be effective.

I urge my colleagues to support this bill, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I again thank my colleague from Arkansas (Mr. Hill) and now-Governor Carney, as well, for working on this bill over the past years. I look forward to it being signed into law.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to voice support for the dedicated public servants who make this country great.

President Trump campaigned on a promise to drain the swamp, and instead he nominated unqualified Wall Street executives and career politicians for Cabinet and senior-level positions, leaving the next level of appointments almost entirely unfilled, all while threatening to cut the experienced Federal workforce who make our government work well every day.

As the only Ph.D. physicist in Congress, I know that many of these Federal workers and their support staff are scientists who work every day to advance innovation and improve our standard of living. The Department of Energy, for example, relies on scientists with technical expertise to run our national labs. The success of their work depends on long-term sustained funding and a continuity of competent leadership to make their new ideas a reality.

But our President's skinny budget would destroy scientific funding and force us to give up our place as a leader in innovation, and many of his appointments are insulting jokes. So last weekend I joined the March for Science because it is clear that this administration does not value science and scientific enterprise.

I call on my colleagues here today to support scientists and Federal workers. And if a swamp needs to be drained, the place to start is Mar- a-Lago.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H.R. 1219, the Supporting America's Innovators Act of 2017.

This bill will increase the number of accredited investors who can invest in an angel or venture fund before requiring the fund to register as an investment company. This will encourage capital formation in one of the major types of funds that seed startups and helps bring new ideas to market.

Innovation and invention are integral to economic growth, but new ideas are only the first step in the type of businesses that can grow the economic pie. It is crucial that these companies have access to capital to grow and to bring the product to market. Competition from startups, bolstered by access to funding, creates jobs and forces incumbent firms to stay aggressive in their own research and development.

H.R. 1219 is exactly the type of bipartisan legislation that Congress should be considering to facilitate capital formation.

This bill will make it easier to form a fund made up of sophisticated investors who can assess and bear the risks that come with investing in startups. These funds are capped at $10 million in paid-in and callable capital. This means the funds will largely be engaged in angel investing that helps early-stage investors build a better mousetrap. These funds can often be cheaper for the company and can be structured as equity debt or a combination of both.

A fund like this can bring expertise and connections that increase the likelihood of success for the inventor. It can also spread the risk and rewards for investors because it is important to note that not every invention will turn into the next big thing.

We need a startup ecosystem that encourages the testing of new ideas and products with a wide range of risks and rewards. This bill is a targeted measure to help create that ecosystem by enhancing the ability of early-stage companies to get funding.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support the bill today.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the gentleman from Rhode Island for yielding and for leading this important conversation.

We come here today to call attention to a misguided turn that this administration proposes to take in our country's cultural history.

I am the only Ph.D physicist in Congress, so I frequently come to the floor to speak out in defense of science and scientific research, but I am here today

for another reason, to call attention to the grave threat that President Trump's budget poses to the future of our country's arts and culture.

What is it that makes a country great; and how will our country be viewed a generation from now, a century from now, or in the next millennia?

To answer this question, we can only look to the great nations of the past. Why was Athens great in a way that Sparta never was?

Why is Florence, under the Medici, revered and remembered in a way that its forgotten competitors never are?

It is because, after they defended their homeland, after they conquered their rivals in war, after they triumphed in commerce, those countries invested a significant fraction of their national wealth in things that had nothing to do with material conquest.

The Medici supported the science and the art of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and the Renaissance masters; and Athens supported the immortal accomplishments of the Greek storytellers, historians, artists, and philosophers, and that is what made them great.

For many decades, our country has supported the arts and humanities through the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities. Now our President has proposed a budget that would cut these Endowments completely in favor of more defense spending and a useless wall on our southern border.

The National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities provide critical funding for students and organizations throughout the country, including in my district in Illinois. His budget proposes that we wipe them away completely. These cuts might make the President feel like a hero in the short term, but they will be a disaster for our country's place in human history.

Programs that support understanding of the arts and humanities play a vital role in our society. They give us knowledge and a shared cultural base that we rely on every day, regardless of what career we go into. And they also help children and students of all ages embrace the complexity and the wonder of humanity.

History, literature, and the arts connect us to a common past and allow us to explore our differences and to understand places beyond our own imaginations. Simply put, the arts and humanities teach us how to be compassionate and understanding toward other people. This is what makes America truly great.

The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities help show us what it means to be human because, regardless of who you are and what you do, knowledge, empathy, and compassion are the national values and the human values that we need to defend, not with bombs and fighter jets, but with sustained support and the cultivation of knowledge and culture.

Now, for most of my career in science, I worked at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The founding director of Fermilab, Robert Wilson, spoke eloquently about this over 40 years ago. Bob was a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and who walked away from his security clearance and dedicated his life to pure science, to building giant accelerators, experiments, international collaborations at Fermilab to explore the fundamental properties of matter.

He was also an artist who, after he made all of the magnets and particle accelerators, then filled his laboratory with graceful and imaginative art.

In 1969, he was called to testify in front of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy to answer why it was that we were spending all of this money at Fermilab during the Cold War and what all this had to do with the national defense.

Robert Wilson looked the committee in the eye and said that all of the work at Fermilab, driven by natural human curiosity, has nothing at all to do with the national defense except, perhaps, to make our country more worth defending.

So I would hope that a President so bent on building his wall and increasing our defense budget by over $50 billion, to the detriment of funding for education, science, and the arts, would pause for a moment and heed those words from history so that a century from now, when our children and grandchildren look back on this time in our country's history, they will see that the human values of our country were always what made it more worth defending, in part, because of the greatness that the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities have sustained for decades.

So I thank my colleague from Rhode Island for this important discussion.

Mr. Speaker, I have a motion to recommit at the desk.

I am opposed.

Mr. Speaker, this is the final amendment to the bill, which will not kill the bill or send it back to committee. If adopted, the bill will immediately proceed to final passage, as amended.

This amendment is a commonsense and logical addition to this bill. It will help ensure that members of the EPA's Science Advisory Board will act in the best interests of the American people and our environment.

I think that we can all agree that, now more than ever, we need integrity in government. And this amendment would simply prohibit any member of the EPA's Science Advisory Board from being employed by any entity, corporate or otherwise, which has interests before the Board. This prohibition would be in place during the member's time on the Board and would extend for 3 years after they leave the Board.

My Republican colleagues have taken up this bill with the stated intent of protecting the scientific integrity of the EPA, and this amendment will go a long way to making sure that they keep their word.

The underlying bill also includes a similar prohibition on board members applying for a grant or contract from the EPA during their service or for 3 years after. And as the chairman just said, there is nothing wrong with a financial cooling-off period.

However, the authors of this bill are apparently concerned that members of the Board would be tempted to favor environmental concerns in the hopes of getting an EPA grant. Therefore, it also stands to reason that they should worry equally about a board member tilting the scales in favor of a specific industry in return for future financial compensation or career advancement, the classic revolving door problem.

So what this motion to recommit does is something that I think we all should be able to agree is a good thing. We have seen too many people in the President's Cabinet who appear to have connections too close to the big interests they regulate rather than the interests of the American people.

This amendment would ensure that no one can unduly personally profit from their time at the EPA, and that members are there to represent the interests of the American people and our environment rather than their own self interests.

Finally, I would like to close by bringing up a more general question of why we seem to be having variations on this repetitive theme of whether or not we can pollute our way out of the structural and economic challenges that our country faces.

Mr. Speaker, you and your party have been very successful at selling yourselves and your supporters on the idea that if we can just, once again, dump unlimited pollutants into our rivers and streams, into our groundwater, our food, air, lungs, our bloodstreams and those of our children, then everything will be great again in America.

This week, we saw our President surrounded by earnest and hopeful young coal miners as he gutted environmental regulations and promised them that all their jobs were coming back. And then we have seen interviews on TV with desperate families in Appalachia using up their life savings to pay for training for underground coal jobs that they have been told will be coming back now that Donald Trump is President.

Then we have seen interviews with coal executives quietly pointing out that those jobs will not come back; that it was machines and fundamental economic forces that took those jobs in coal country.

The story is the same in oil country, where even as oil production has rebounded, the jobs and wages have not come back because of automation, the same way that machines took the jobs in rural America, manufacturing America, and increasingly middle class, white-collar America.

So until we realize that we are all in this together and that a fundamental restructuring of our economy is needed rather than a mindless retraction of the protections on environmental quality on the land that we will pass on to our children, then I am afraid that we are destined to repeat this infinite loop of marginally productive debate. I urge my colleagues to vote ``yes'' on this motion to recommit.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Speaker, for 7 years, Republicans have been making promises about their secret healthcare plan. They said that under their plan, nobody would have to carry health insurance if they did not want to; and then when they got sick, they could demand their health insurance with no exclusions for preexisting conditions, no limits on coverage for expensive diseases, and that their coverage would be better and cheaper than ObamaCare for all Americans.

While they made these questionable promises, the Affordable Care Act provided more than 20 million Americans with lifesaving health care. And now, after 7 years, Republicans have finally revealed their secret plan. We now see that virtually all their promises were lies. Their plan will rapidly bankrupt Medicare, and those over 50 will see massive cost increases, and millions will lose their health care.

They did keep one promise, though. Massive new tax cuts for the wealthy. For that, millions of American families will pay a terrible price.