Bernie Moreno Questions Commerce Nominee About Evolution Of U.S.-China Trade Relations

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During a Senate Commerce Committee hearing last week, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) questioned Paul Dabbar, nominee to be Deputy Secretary of Commerce, about the U.S.-China Relations Act of 2000.

Transcript

00:00Thank you for being here. Thank you for serving your country for the fourth time. I appreciate

00:05that. Look forward to having you confirmed. Taking up from my colleagues, we're talking

00:11about innovation, something that's near and dear to my heart. I recently introduced a very

00:16bipartisan bill called the Deploying American Blockchain Act. Passed this committee pretty

00:20unanimously, which is good to see. And I just want to make certain that you're committed

00:24to implementing that properly when it gets passed by both chambers to really look at

00:31what America can do to take that next step in being the center for the evolution of blockchain

00:37technology. So I haven't read your bill, Senator, but certainly support American leadership on

00:44blockchain. Right. And shifting gears, you're somebody who's run pretty complex organizations.

00:50There's not a lot of people who had that in their background. So look forward to having

00:54you run, help the Secretary Lutnik run commerce. Is it fair to say in your experience in the

01:01government and in the private sector, running complex organizations, does more money always

01:08equal better results? No, Senator. Sometimes the opposite, right? But that's something that

01:15I think most people who haven't run organizations would feel that that's an odd paradigm, right?

01:20Because typically the idea is more people, more money. You have a problem, throw money at it,

01:26throw people at it. Can you talk about what you've seen in your experience, why that's a fallacy?

01:31So a lot of times money can be spent on things that have not been, are not needed, I think is a good

01:39way of putting it. So I'll give you an example. When I was undersecretary for science, we had just won,

01:46we were just winning when I showed up, the Nobel Prize for lithium ion chemistry. But the department

01:54was still spending money on lithium ion battery discovery science, not scaling, not manufacturing,

02:01but discovery science. And so we were spending something that we won the Nobel Prize on. And I

02:06think we could say that was a declaration of victory for discovery science. And so that was not a really

02:14great place to kind of keep on spending money into something that we already had victory on.

02:20So we refocused the money on the future. And so I think that's an example of, you know, the right

02:27way to think about where the taxpayer money should be looking at.

02:31So as we talk about cuts and assessments of different programs, it's absolutely something that's

02:38essential, right? To see where's the money most efficiently and setting up better processes,

02:44better systems, and taking advantage of technology is a much better way to go than just randomly

02:50throwing a bunch of money into a problem. Absolutely. And I'm going to be mildly dangerous

02:56and bring up Hanford with Senator Cantwell. There was a lot of money spent for a very long period of

03:01time. And a lot of different directions have been, I'm almost paraphrasing the senator from many years

03:07ago, heading in different directions that we're not accomplishing very much. And when the senator

03:13looked at me and Secretary Buriette eight years ago and said, can you can you say that we're going

03:19to focus on the things that work rather than things are not working, not pivot back and forth and get

03:24things done. And one of the proudest things I think the two of us and others did was last couple

03:30of days of the previous administration was to call up the senator and say that we had completed

03:34construction. That's great. Shifting gears again, 25 years ago, so we're in a 25th year anniversary

03:42of what I think is the most toxic, most outrageously terrible bill in the history of the United States

03:48of America, which is the U.S.-China Normalization Act. The GDP of China at that point in time, 25 years

03:55ago was $1.2 trillion. It's projected to be $20 trillion next year. Who won and who lost?

04:06The accession of China to the WTO and the normalization was very, very poor to the U.S. economy

04:16and in particular to the manufacturing workers at about 5 million people lost their jobs.

04:22And given the velocity of money in the communities, you can multiply that by 5 or 6. We lost about

04:2825 to 30 million jobs in this country as a result of, to a large degree, of that topic.

04:36What kind of jobs?

04:37Well, certainly the manufacturing jobs were the 5 million that had dropped.

04:41These are jobs that are family-sustaining wages, where you could live, provide for a family,

04:46retire with dignity?

04:47Yeah. Dignity and middle-class jobs is what was lost because of that.

04:53And what would happen in your mind if we just ignored it? If we just said, look, if we could

04:59make cheap goods some other country and bring them into the United States, where would we

05:03be in 10 years?

05:05I think the trends that we're seeing around fentanyl, trends that we're seeing on small-town

05:10America, that really accelerated over the last 20 years because of that collapse of manufacturing

05:18and related jobs.

05:21Yeah, I think you'll see that continue.

05:23And I think all of us, you know, don't want to see that continue.

05:26Well, thank you.

05:27Well, thank you.

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