Majority Leader Schumer Floor Remarks On The Announcement Of Tech Hubs Made Possible By The CHIPS And Science Act Across The Country

Washington, D.C. – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor on the announcement of 31 tech hubs all across the nation thanks to the CHIPS and Science Act. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:

Yesterday was a really exciting day, thanks to two words: tech hubs.

I spent the day traveling across Upstate New York, sharing the great news that the Buffalo-Rochester-Syracuse and the Binghamton region just won the prestigious Tech Hub designation’s that I created in our CHIPS and Science Act. This announcement mean one thing: more good paying, long lasting jobs are coming to Upstate New York, an area that’s seen so many companies leave over the last three four decades.

Yesterday’s Tech Hub celebration was something I’ve been working hard towards for a very long time. When I was writing the Tech Hubs program with Senator Young into our bipartisan Endless Frontiers Act, and then into the CHIPS and Science Act, I had Upstate New York in mind.

And now, thanks to this new designation, communities and cities across Upstate are facing a reawakening. The region is now primed to become a global hub for workforce training, innovation, and semiconductor manufacturing. But it’s not just Upstate New York that’s affected, it’s a metaphor for the whole country, there are two tech hubs in New York and twenty nine others around the country.

From coast to coast, in red states and blue states. And when I talked about Tech Hubs for cities like Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse and Binghamton, my colleague and friend on the Republican side, Todd Young was talking about tech hubs in his state of Indiana, in places like Indianapolis and South Bend and Fort Wayne.

The whole idea is this – the tech industry has gravitated to a few large cities, my own city of New York, which is greatly benefiting, San Francisco, Boston, Austin, Los Angeles, but there’s a load of talent in the rest of the country. It’s just that no one paid attention to these places.

That’s the ideas of Tech Hubs. There were four hundred applications across the country [to] the Department of Commerce, and I salute Secretary Raimondo, who was very careful in picking the place where it could actually work. And, that’s why there are thirty one.

So this is a great thing, and it will spread, it will take advantage of the talent that already exists in the companies and universities, and individuals and schools, in the heartland of the country, not just on the coasts, and give them a real chance to take part and create tens of thousands, millions of good-paying jobs in every part of the country.

So I was really proud of the tech hubs proposals, and it’s going to continue. We’re going to put more funding into it, we’re going to do everything we can to help tech hubs grow, and help America grow, and stay number one in the world. Because when we invest in high-end science and high end manufacturing and research, everybody, everybody benefits.

So this is good news, in red states, in blue states. Secretary Raimondo didn’t look around and just say, oh we can only do blue states, like Donald Trump might have done. She’s put them in all the places that there can be new help.

So let’s look at the contrast here folks. While House Republicans struggle to even select a Speaker, these Tech Hub announcements show that President Biden and Democrats are delivering: putting tens of thousands of people to work in good paying jobs, opening new plants and factories, and securing American leadership in the technologies of tomorrow.

Not in a very long time has the contrast between the parties been as glaring as today: when Democrats lead the way, Americans see more jobs, more manufacturing, lower costs. When Republicans are in charge, right-wing Republicans, not all of them, but the right-wing seems to be running the show, these MAGA Republicans, it leads to paralysis, chaos and extremism. 

No matter how the GOP impasse in the House is resolved, Democrats will not change our focus: we will create more jobs, work to lower costs, and do it on a bipartisan basis whenever we can.

###