During Thursday’s House Appropriations Committee hearing, Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-MD) questioned Commerce Sec. Howard Lutnick about MBDA funding cuts.
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00:00Mr. Ivey.
00:03Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
00:06Good morning, Mr. Secretary.
00:09I wanted to join quickly with the comments from the chair and the ranking member regarding NOAA.
00:16And I hear your point about fake news and numbers, but I'll say this.
00:20I mean, I have two NOAA installations in my district, and headquarters is, I don't know, just a couple miles across the line.
00:27And I heard a very different story than what you're saying about people being forced out of there.
00:33But I look forward to getting the answers that you provide here.
00:36I also saw your comments with respect to Senator Van Hollen yesterday.
00:42I look forward to seeing your responses to his questions, too.
00:45I wanted to ask you about MBDA, which the ranking member raised as well.
00:49Well, during your confirmation hearing on January 29th before the Senate Commerce Committee, Senator Blunt Rochester asked,
00:57yes or no, do you support dismantling the MBDA?
01:00And you said, I do not.
01:03Now, I got the skinny budget numbers here.
01:06And it's got EDA and MBDA combined with a cut for $624 million.
01:15And in the narrative connected with that, it says that MBDA, the agency, is fully eliminated.
01:23So I wanted to ask you what changed and what's the status of MBDA at this point?
01:32MBDA is not being fully eliminated.
01:35That's inaccurate.
01:37We are reducing it to its statutory minimum size, as is appropriate.
01:43The problem I see with MBDA...
01:46Could I ask you before you move on, what does that mean, statutory minimum size?
01:51I mean, it is required by law to be a certain size, and we will have it be a certain size.
01:57What size is that?
01:58It was 65 people.
02:00I think that's less than 10 people.
02:03Okay.
02:03And why are you doing that?
02:04We're both small size.
02:05The problem is, the GAO gives me a report that says there are 80 other programs and 80 institutions that are so much larger, 10 times larger, that achieve the same outcomes.
02:21And we are just too small and too inefficient to do it correctly.
02:26So I think we are better served than other programs.
02:30I apologize.
02:31I've got a couple other areas to hit.
02:33I'd love to see that GAO report.
02:35I want to know what those 80 other entities are because I'm not aware of them.
02:39Maybe SBA has an overlap with the MBDA mission, but the other...
02:45I don't know what those other ones could be.
02:47But I look forward to hearing back from you on that because I think it's an important agency.
02:53It's statutory, so it needs to be maintained, certainly at some level.
02:59And there's a lot of benefit from it.
03:01I would also mention the Congressional Black Caucus sent you a letter on this issue and asked for a response by April 18th.
03:07I don't think we've received it yet, so I would ask that you provide that response as well.
03:11Let me move quickly to quantum technology.
03:19This is kind of a quicker point for me, but quantum computing, this chart shows basically funding by governments.
03:29China, as you can see, far outpaces the United States.
03:33We've got a couple of other...
03:34I couldn't see it, but I was guessing the top bar.
03:37Yeah.
03:37I didn't need to see the words.
03:38I got the point.
03:40Fair enough, fair enough.
03:40Well, here's the question, because this is concerning, obviously.
03:46You touched on this a bit in your opening testimony.
03:48You only talked about the enforcement side of competition with China, and clearly they are stealing a lot of our data.
03:55But they're also committing a lot of engineers, scientists, and resources to outpacing us on the legitimate side of this, too, from the competitive side.
04:07I don't see that being reflected in, not just the Commerce Department, but the overall U.S. budget.
04:14IonQ is a company in my district.
04:16It's a spinoff from the University of Maryland's incubator.
04:19We have a lot of those across the country.
04:22Quick point.
04:23Oh, man, I'm out of time already.
04:25The cuts that are being made, and there's an article I'll submit for the record here.
04:31World scientists look elsewhere as U.S. labs stagger under Trump cuts.
04:38New York Times cuts in research and scientists brain drain.
04:41As we push these people out, I mean, you can shake your head if you want, but I went to visit IonQ.
04:47And one of the things that came up was, I was like, how many of these people are from the United States?
04:53And he said, not many.
04:54And I said, why is that?
04:56And he said, well, in part because the pipeline isn't supplying these here in the United States, so we go overseas to get many of them.
05:03And one last quick point on this.
05:06A venture capital firm I had a chance to meet with said that they invest in, I think there are about 30 of these they invest in.
05:12They've started setting up shop in Canada because they can get their engineers and scientists from overseas quicker over there.
05:19They don't have to go through the immigration piece.
05:21So we're losing money on that front.
05:23So I look forward to hearing from you on that.
05:25Mr. Chairman, I apologize for the overrun, and I appreciate your generosity.
05:34Mr. Klein?