Raimondo, Schumer, Cantwell Continue Push for China Bill
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo headed to Capitol Hill Tuesday to meet with lawmakers and continue pushing for Congress to pass its China package as quickly as possible. She met with the Senate Finance Committee and held a news conference with Sens. Todd Young, R-Ind., and Mark Warner, D-Va. “We have to decrease our dependence on other countries, and the way to do that is make more chips in America,” she said. “We need Congress to get it to the president’s desk as quickly as possible.”
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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., were bullish during a separate news conference on prospects for moving to conference on the House-passed America Creating Opportunities for Manufacturing, Pre-Eminence in Technology and Economic Strength Act (HR-4521) and the Senate-passed U.S. Innovation and Competition Act (S-1260). The Senate voted 66-29 Monday to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to HR-4521, considered the first in potentially a weekslong series of procedural hurdles (see 2203210063) before moving to conference on the two U.S. tech competitiveness measures. HR-4521 and S-1260 both include $52 billion in subsidies to encourage U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturing (see 2201260062) but differ in other areas.
Schumer highlighted the Senate’s cloture vote on HR-4521 as part of Democrats’ commitment to “passing legislation that lowers costs for Americans by fixing supply chain problems that have driven up prices.” Congress needs to “go to conference” on HR-4521 and S-1260 “and we need to say that we are ready to send a signal to industry that we need them to build more chips and we need them to build them” in the U.S., Cantwell told reporters.
The current chip shortage for consumers "is really a national security issue and a cost issue,” including for the telecom industry, Cantwell said. The telecom industry has reported that “the cost of some of their networking equipment has gone up 12% and price gougers are selling chips for 100 times their regular price.” That “will make it harder to roll out broadband across the country,” she said: “Even worse, it’ll make it harder” for U.S. carriers to remove from their networks equipment made by Huawei, ZTE and other companies deemed a national security risk.
Warner highlighted an estimated $1.5 billion of investment in 5G, telecom equipment and the next generation of open radio access networks. China is making significant progress with Huawei, and the legislation will help add U.S. competitors, he said. Young said he’s confident Congress will move by the end of this work period to begin negotiating in conference. Asked if July 4 or the August recess is a realistic timetable for sending a bill to the president’s desk, Warner said he’s hoping for passage “much sooner” than that, and he’s partial to the Senate-passed version.