wage -- it does show wages go down -- companies choose not to pass that price increase along to their customers. anyway, we'll see and that's my big basic sense. thank you very much. week nits this month, we're featuring american history tv programs of a preview of what's available. robert share as few of the unconventional stories from capitol hill, an unruly history of behaving badly. the lecric car that reversed underground passages and a violent capitol. the historical society hosted this event. watch tonight, beginning at 8:00

p.m. eastern and enjoy american history tv every weekend on c-span 3. coming up this weekend, on the civil war and sheridan's ride, the 1854 arrival of junian general john phillips sheridan ending the confederacy of the shenandoah valley. on reel america, four films, including the 1987 film, crossing boarders and women in the family of man. at 6:00 p.m. eastern, it's an assassination attempt. and at 8:00 p.m. eastern, on the presidency, patty troy, author of what jefferson read, and obama tweeted.

talks about how popular culture influences president. watch "american history tv" this weekend on c-span 3. the senate labor committee held a hearing for joe biden's pick for labor secretary. [inaudible conversations] good morning. the senate health education labor pension committee will please come to order. we are holding in the hello nomination to serve as deputy secretary of labor will each have an opening statement and then i will recognize senator

padilla and in centers will have three minutes each for first round i will be happy to stay for a second round if anyone has remaining questions. i do want to walk to the covid-19 safety protocols will follow the advice of the sergeant at arms and conducting position we are all grateful to everyone including our clerk who has worked so hard to get this set up to stay safe and healthy. committee members are seated 6 feet apart and by videoconference and although we are unable to have the hearing fully open to the public the media for in person attendance live video is available if you are in need of accommodations including close captioning reach out to the committee or the office of congressional accessibility services. we received the formal nomination for 13 and with the financial disclosure on

february 18 and the committee paperwork on march 2nd. secretary, and those who are here with you today your family and parents they must be very proud. with the passage of the american rescue plan biden announcing he will announce all states and territories to make all people 18 and over eligible to be vaccinated no later than may 1st we are finally on the right track have to make sure we do not run out of steam before we reach it to get those qualified nominees quickly confirmed there is more work

to be done not only to fully rescue america from the pandemic but recover from the crisis. and then to extend the benefits to help them get by an american rescue plan. one other five are making poverty level wages some are discriminatory sub minimum wage. i'm glad we can take steps to cut child poverty inhofe the need to do more to get quality affordable childcare. with paid family and medical leave especially in the middle of a pandemic one out of four workers do not have paid sick leave. i am thrilled we could protect millions of workers but we

need to help more people plan for retirement one out of four have no retirement savings and women are 80 percent more likely to face poverty in retirement. there is more progress we are making. president biden is taking important steps to protect workers but we know that work is not done yet and even when it is we will do more to ensure people are safe from workplace hazards and pandemics harassment and discrimination that they work to address. president biden to the previous administration that shielded the largest corporations from being held accountable for violations of workers rights. and in addition to these much needed steps that i strengthen the right that to collectively

bargain we all know the economy cannot work without women it's also painfully clear it is not working for them. one out of four women have considered downshifting their careers because of this pandemic. more than 2 million women were left the workforce over the last year and women of color face an even larger pay gap, higher rates of unemployment and a steeper climb to recovery we should do so much more to ensure equity and bigotry that has hurt too many for so long. to have an academy on - - economy for all the secretary of labor that will fight for them experience leading one of the largest state apartments in the nation fighting for workers rights in her personal story at the multilingual daughter of chinese immigrants

in those values to be a valuable secretary of labor and those that are trafficked into the united states and forced to work behind barbed wire in under armed guard. and then to change a lot to make sure corporations are held responsible in their supply chain and then to launch a multilingual campaign to help people speak up about their rights and wages in his california secretary of labor has implemented increases to the state minimum wage expanded access to benefits for those who are paid low wages and including by

establishing and mandatory emergency state safety standards is a champion for workers is loud and clear and it is obvious and urgent we need a fully staffed department of labor to help us end the pandemic to foster healthy communities and the secretary of labor like julie sue to ensure that have a fair and just workplace a secure retirement and access to accommodations and the right to collectively bargain and treated with dignity and respect. i urge my colleagues work with me on a bipartisan basis. and the consent to put into the record 44 letters in support of the nomination for

more than 650 labor unions, former colleagues labor leaders and more. >> good morning and thank you chairwoman. looking at the nomination of secretary sue for deputy secretary of labor. welcome, i congratulate you on your nomination and i know your family is part of what you have accomplished the united states constitution gives the senate the power of advise and consent to approve or reject those officers made. the senate is not a rubberstamp but an equal partner to shape the staff of the executive branch. it is an important responsibility and i do take it personally, i do not take it lately. even when i did not agree with the president or the nominee

if i thought the nominee was qualified for the job deserving my support in fact one month ago i supported the secretary of labor nomination and i said then the background on the skills and awareness for balance of conversations between labor and management and emphasize during the nomination hearing he wanted to work with us collaboratively to help the american workers improve and expand opportunities. and committed to make sure commerce and labor work cooperatively. i'm pleased to support his nomination and provide consent. according to bls california unemployment stands at the second highest in the country and with with the last year of covid with the most onerous restrictions on businesses and individuals and one of the slowest to recover from the pandemic the controversial

bill would have decimated many of the companies that help to give the state its reputation huber and lift were both born in california and revolutionized how people around the world get from place to place. both companies would have to cease operations in the very state in which they are headquartered if the bill would be implemented as past. the law was so radical the same california voters and just whopping 75 percent. that applies to the individuals as well as businesses and with the state liabilities on the states balance sheet. ranking california 49th out of 50 states the idea if you

want less of something, make it more expensive the mercantile center find that has the most regulatory restrictions in the country just 30 percent more than those with the restrictions. those that weigh heavily on employers it's another reason why we are seeing so many businesses free california with more reasonable policies that's why explains why so many are leaving california bringing their jobs from elsewhere progress the a lot of moving trucks with texas plates in north carolina as long as they don't bring their politics we are happy to welcome them with open arms. turning to the nominee, gaining the support for the nomination for some friends

that made it clear that think you'll be a shadow secretary when the role is chief operating officer. your friends may have thought they were helping you that some of what they said raises questions. secretary su we discussed yesterday in my office, i hope you can convince the committee you understand the job you been nominated for. also i hope you can demonstrate you are not aiming to drag mayor away from a sensible agenda he committed to pursuing when he sat for you said today in your confirmation hearing. second, having been or concerned about the fraud in california unemployment insurance california suffered some of the largest fraud in our nations history during the pandemic over 11 billion of fried in the unemployment system even inmates on death

row received unemployment checks i'm sure there is a reasonable debate on the death penalty but i cannot imagine paying people on death row to be unemployed what's worse the fried committed on the taxpayer it was entirely preventable it's my understanding an auditor made a series of recommendations just as you check office specifically recommending california exclude sensitive information including social security numbers from the identification system that nothing changed in fact when the fraud was ramping up and billions were stolen from taxpayers california actually made things worse ordering the agency to eliminate safeguards that led to even more fraud additionally the state audit showed they only answered 1 percent of their calls.

these are of extreme proportion california has received hundreds of millions per year every year over the past decade and federal funds for the administration of unemployment system but no changes or improvements to those systems were made. is not washington's fault it still uses cobalt you would think with the tech companies still in silicon valley that one or two could provide new technology and new systems as we discussed yesterday comments through allstate struggled, but california out struggles everyone else that everyone here today is seeking a promotion so while you may not personally be responsible for every case of our that happens it did happen under your watch.

so why is that and experience the senate should reward with a promotion? i will keep an open mind as we go through your willingness through the committee today. >> now secretary - - senator padilla. >> thank you for once again to introduce a fellow californian i'm honored to introduce deputy secretary to be secretary su i'm confident her experiences secretary for the california labor workforce development agency will enable her to immediately hit the ground running at the federal level.

as they are struggling to survive the economic impact of the covid-19 pandemic. there is certainly no better preparation for the challenges we are facing with a distinct level in the state of california that represents the fifth largest economy in the world the largest economy of any state in the nation and reflects the business conditions that we see across the country. as you will hear from her, julie is the proud daughter of immigrants. her parents came from china in search of a better life. just like my parents did. her parents worked minimum wage jobs for decades. julie understands how hard families in america are working right now just to make ends meet.

the brain - - the upbringing ingrained with the dry-cleaning and laundromat business and a restaurant. she learned firsthand what goes into making businesses succeed and she knows how to help them how to help workers. as a seasoned lawyer and in mandarin and spanish spending two decades are presenting workers including immigrants and workers of color. she became deeply familiar with their struggles of garment workers, hotel housekeepers, caregivers, nurse restaurant and retail workers. workers in all the industries that have been severely impacted by the pandemic and are critical to our nation's

economic recovery. as commissioner through 2018 julie march the first campaign to help low-wage workers and employers understand their rights. and as secretary of the california workforce development agency she has overseen several on - - several major departments to improve access to training and promote good quality jobs and eliminate barriers and create innovative pathways and level the playing field for employers large and small.

joe julie knows collaboration is key to success and that's why so many small business groups and chambers of commerce are supportive of her nomination. i know that california has struggled with the unemployment system in recent months with the same organized criminals that have targeted several states around the country. that is why julie's experience is even more helpful and needed by the federal government as they will work with states to crack down on unemployment fraud nationwide she will take every opportunity to expand opportunities to achieve the american dream just as her parents did. a proven leader uniquely to take uniquely qualified to give the fair and respectful consideration that she has earned for the committee to support her nomination. >> thank you senator padilla. senator her owner was planning to be here today but unfortunately she had to fly home to hawaii for a personal emergency but she did write a statement of support ask

unanimous consent. >>. >> members of the committee and ranking member i'm honored to appear before you today and prior to this hearing. i've enjoyed our discussions about the department of labor and a critical role to meet the challenges of our time. i appreciate the chance to share with you my vision for the deputy secretary of labor's role. want to start by thinking president biden for this incredible opportunity and also my parents are watching from california along with my daughter, a high school senior who will attend amherst college in the fall and play on the basketball team. my older daughter is with me today.

a student at yale and i am so grateful she could be here in person. my children and i are proud products of the american dream. i'm a daughter chinese immigrants my mom immigrated to the united states in a 30 day voyage of a cargo ship she cannot afford a passenger take it. both parents came to america for opportunity and they found it in provo utah where they studied in madison wisconsin where my sister and i were born, and ultimately in the home they built in search of warmer weather in southern california. working minimum wage jobs while going to school and in still a need a deep appreciation for the struggles and pride in work. my mom eventually got a job working at l.a. county starting as an office clerk and was hired after 27 years -

- fired after 24 years they gave my - - was retired after 27 years gave security and health insurance and predictable hours and now that she is retired, a pension. i know well what a good union job does for a family because i'm a direct beneficiary. while i was growing up my family on the dry-cleaning and laundromat business and later a pizza restaurant. for years my dad would go to the day job and then go directly to our business returning home after 10:00 p.m. often with a pizza a customer rejected for us to pack in the school lunch the next day. of appreciation for small business who are the engines of our economy. also translating for my periods a tough experience for immigrant families. after college i went to law school and became the first lawyer in my family. my experience as a translator at home shaped my commitment to make the lot understandable and meaningful to individuals

too often left out of the economy. and with immigrant workers of color and hotel housekeepers restaurant and retail workers. those that have been hardest hit by the covid pandemic what i have learned working for a full-time live then poverty. too many are denied pay for a hard days work and as we have seen in the pandemic too many workers have to choose between the safety and livelihoods. at the same time working people were given a chance to organize and be heard to bring

the help of such opportunity to those around them. if confirmed, will bring these lessons and experiences to my role as we collectively continue to navigate these trying times. for the past ten years i have served the people of california to build a fair economy to support businesses and workers all of whom went a fair shot of opportunity and security. i prioritized innovative partnerships with employers with robust labor laws to combat wage left during that time to lead and manage programs in california the largest economy i've seen firsthand three things i want to share today. one. with a clear vision and commitment to making government work and rejecting the idea we have to do it this way because it's always been done this way we can transform what we do and how we do it. government has a meaningful role to play to provide support to employers that play by the rules.

and with those workforce programs to provide training to meet the needs of workers to give more workers access to quality jobs. so much of what the government can do for employers and employees are leader dedicated to finding and expanding those areas of common ground. and three, the lowest paid workers deserve government support and respect. it is possible we cannot only ensure that earned wages make it into their pocket but also build the space in the very idea of government itself.

i am grateful for the chance to preserve and expand the american dream for all americans and if confirmed as a deputy secretary of labor i look forward to my partnership with you in the years to come. i look forward to your questions. >> thank you very much secretary su not around a five-minute questions. please keep track of your clock and stay within the five minutes. i'm happy to stay if anyone has additional questions for the second round. secretary su grappling with the health and economic impact of the covid-19 pandemic i am optimistic of the rising rates of vaccinations and drops of cases and deaths in recent weeks but a long road of economic recovery ahead. essential workers have spent the last year responding on the frontlines, that many lack paid sick days or fair wages and health and safety protections. millions of workers remain unemployed and late 2020 some estimate showed one quarter a small businesses remained closed the biggest of those owned by women, people of color and immigrants.

secretary su you have led the labor agency response to the pandemic overseeing implementation of the state and federal rules defending rights of workers and ensuring health and safety on the job. tell us what you have learned from your experience leading the response of the nation's largest state to the covid pandemic and how does your state leadership experience in form how you approach the federal response from department of labor. >> thank you so much chairman murray for your ongoing leadership especially with women in the workplace. every work i've ever represented or assisted or worked with tommy something different. the one thing they'll taught me what we are able to do together is more than when we work alone. with the collaboration of listening that we can accomplish big things and create a seat for everyone to

be heard as a way approach the job of deputy secretary of labor. over the last year i worked with those of many interest in government we need to work across all agencies to meet the challenges our country faces. it's how we approach covid with the pandemic and they welcomed this approach. all levels of government , local and state and federal have to work together. at the end of the day people don't care how we draw our lines they just want to know that made their lives better. i understand how to support career staff in government agencies to enable them to meet the mission of their departments. organizations including government investing and making things work. last week the president spoke directly about the pandemic

and the longest walk any parent has to make to the children's bedroom to say i have lost my job and this past year too many americans had to do that. the unemployment insurance system is supposed to be a safety net for those times. in california, ui claims jumped dramatically from the last week of february through two weeks later 1400 percent. the number of claims by mid april was more than the total number in all 2019. this meant like every other state california's unemployment insurance system was overwhelmed. each claim represented somebody who suddenly had the ground fall out from under them. personally heard from these individuals, people who when they had a job, then the next day didn't know how they would pay rent and were going to food banks, living in their cars and worried if they could buy life-saving medication.

so the magnitude of the suffering cannot be overstated. california had one out of five claims in the entire nation we were working on a system on outdated technology. i identify this as a priority in 2019 but frankly system upgrades are not quick in the first. when the pandemic hit, our technology that made the system fragile and inflexible. this didn't just happen in california but it proves something that i have brought through my decades of work to improve systems and organization. but we have to invest to make things work in good times so we can meet our needs in bad and this is especially true with unemployment insurance because a system that is most needed in the worst of times if we has - - we have seen

this last year. taken steps in california to process the historic numbers of claims and we went up we got to the point paying over $1 billion a week and benefits to individuals who needed it. many that was a lifeline to individuals and put money back into the economy because the recipients of the benefits paid directly from necessities like groceries and went. the foundation that performed one - - and evaluates performance across the country california was first one - - company was second colorado first of claims paid that despite the large numbers in the technologies the steps we took help to deliver this should never happen the safety net in place does not work and is not strong enough. we have to updater system. we have to get payments out. >> excuse me.

hello? >> and has a big table to approach these issues with the national approach because they are national problem if confirmed i will be proud to work with all of you on these problems. >> thank you very much for that response. >> thank you senator murray. welcome secretary. to prior labor secretaries has said the role is one of chief operating officer. however in an interview with fox - - fox, congresswoman chu said before you agreed to take on the deputy will you had a talk with the commissioner that he would have the ability to concentrate on your areas of expertise.

these are yes or no answers do you see the role as deputy secretary of labor as the chief operating officer yes or no? >> thank you ranking member and the time you took to meet with me and we also talked about this then i do look at it as the chief operating officer of the department. >> will your priority be managing the department of labor 15000 employees in ten regions? yes or no. >> my priority will be to best serve as labor secretary to make sure the department of labor delivers on its mission and absolutely the priority is what you just mentioned in terms of supervising, managing making sure the department works well and the staff has what they need to perform their jobs at the highest level. >> the buck stops with you as labor secretary in california. california has provided at

least ten.4,000,000,031,000,000,000 in fraudulent unemployment insurance payments under your leadership. yes or no answers. shortly after your appointed secretary of state auditor urging the employment development department to address the mailing system after millions of social security numbers were included but the issues of unemployment insurance but that audit audit happened will before and then to be implement it. >> and with the federal

funding in response to covid-19 and in september 2020 the state auditor was directed by the california joint committee to conduct emergency audit of edd. the audits conducted one was about fried you directed the employment with a certain claimants to make key eligibility determinations and to temporarily stop knowing that the unemployment insurance system is that fried you chose to remove the checks

and balances. yes or no? the pandemic fried perpetrate across the country is a nationwide insidious criminal that's a different situation as well with the audit of operations that mentioned that i suspect consistent with department of labor guidance to make sure to get out to californians with threats to the stability and the security of our system. there was no finding that decision led to the massive fraud. >> you didn't waive any certifications? >> we did not.

we had to certify every two weeks and what we said because of the pandemic that the people are going back to work and not the semester them and one last question and the deputy secretary of labor your job is to prevent fraud and abuse with taxpayer spending. will you prioritize expedience over protecting against fraud. >> the ui system is a dual effort to get payments out to those that need them. i will certainly prioritize the fight against fraud to be

on war footing the battle against criminal enterprises that is one front in the fight. we been on the frontlines when we saw the initial spike in claims and then to stop the automatic backdating of claims. but the department of labor expected all states to do it and it shut down a number of the fraudulent claims. she was one of nine - - one the first five states to do so to stop identity theft fraud that cost every state those

that would do that and take that explains in california to shut the front door to fraud that the systems are secure and then to support the states in the effort rather than leaving states to fend for themselves. >>. >> thank you for putting yourself word for this secretary su for this position but first i want to make a brief comment on the nomination from a personal perspective yours is a great american story of success in hard work to have an

opportunity to serve at the federal level and we appreciate the work what we have done in the state of california. and then to expand employment opportunities for people with disabilities. and those in the last couple of decades of assisted technology job coaching is another and other supports that enable people disabilities to succeed in the workplace and quality employment opportunities for people with disabilities at the same time continue to be far too limited.

we still have a long way to go to provide those quality unemployment opportunities those thousands of individuals also continue to be paid a sub minimum wage under section 14 see under the fair labor standards act which is wrong. will you commit to working with me and other members of the house and senate to create more and better opportunities for people disabilities and to expand competitive integrative employment opportunities? >> thank you so much. yes. i will commit to working with you on that issue. this administration shares your concern about minimum wage and we believe it's a matter of equity and fairness certainly as we recover from the pandemic particularly for

those but as working with state government and then it becomes fairly common in what has transpired last couple years with the staffing vacancies and then coming in from the state government that has challenges can you talk about your experience to take over with the buy-in of new employees to achieve a

mission. and the same the role of deputy secretary. i am appreciate our conversation. with the government agencies. with his time in leadership when the agencies have been a part of. and what the career staff at the department of labor who i understand have somewhat marginalized to be anxious and excited to work alongside with mayor walsh and if i'm confirm

to restore a sense of mission at the department of labor it's important to invest i spent my career fighting for people including my own staff with the need of our employees and training and direction and the opportunity to create as a team to tackle different problems. the idea and allowing people to innovate and those are areas i have experience in to bring to the department. >> secretary su welcome i

believe every man on - - member the panel would agree with you unemployment insurance is not only critical however there can be no excuse for the rampant fraud that has been so prevalent in california. now i recognize there has been ui fraud throughout the country including in the state of maine. but the sheer scale and scope of the fraud and california not only towards that of every other state of 11.$4 billion that seems to be directly related to directives that you issued an is fraudulent payments are incredible, $20000 payments to

our colleague dianne feinstein $800 million worth of payments that went to prison inmates? 1700 claims from a single address but yet they were paid? you gave a confusing answer in my judgment to senator burr about the directives that you issued. so i pulled up a press release that your department issued and it says very clearly that you sent a memorandum to the employment director directing that department to temporarily suspend unemployment eligibility certification. so another words, they are

paying ui benefits before determining if the applicants are eligible. you also directed the agency to temporarily stop collecting eligibility certifications from claimants. now the us department of later on - - labor did not waive those requirements and to jeopardize the integrity of the system do you agree with the state auditor and federal requirements. why do you take those actions? why do you jeopardize the integrity of the system? and the perfect storm the massive spike in claims on the

heels of record levels of unemployment along with technological changes so that created a perfect storm of challenges. california has received a lot of attention because we are a very large state. one out of five claims in the entire country. with also texas and your combined we have been faced with challenges but the unemployment insurance system itself the fraud that has to do with the eligibility requirements you're talking about that california has been even in the pandemic about 5 percent which is comparable in years prior in 2019. those that you are concerned

about im to with the unemployment assistance program which did not have the same requirements. so those 10 percent of total payments that is about the same with the department of labor estimates is fraud nationwide on the system i'm putting it in context and we need an external straight team to understand why there was a delay in payments to figure out what we need to fix and now we made that straight team important that has raised more attention of what we're doing in california but to talk about the early and aggressive steps to stop the fraud. the program was more

vulnerable to fraud because we all learned with the balance because we needed to and when we saw the fraud we need to immediate steps taken by the department of labor in congress also took steps to put in more criteria before payments could be made this will require all hands on deck. my sense is on the fraud piece because every state has seen it for those technological systems that we need a national approach to the national problem and based on my first-hand experience i would bring that experience we need people who understand

what the problems are and how to interconnect and what we do about them to make sure we are making payments where needed and stopping fraud where we need to. >> my time has expired i will follow up with you because i still don't think i got an answer to my question about you suspending the requirements. >> senator baldwin. >> thank you chair mary and thank you secretary su for joining us i look forward to working with you to address the many challenges of the nation workers and families are facing. millions of essential

healthcare workers and food service workers on the frontlines of this pandemic since it began. and i believe it is time for congress and the administration to put their health and safety. including in a january 21st in order president biden asked congress to strengthen and expand osha's ability with every worker protection act and that is central to combating this pandemic? and do you believe the issuance of the osha standard

is still necessary to protect workers from covid to help businesses safely reopened? >> i so enjoyed our conversation and the memories of childhood when my parents lived in eagle heights with incredible diversity i do agree that we need to do everything we can to protect the health and safety of workers that we have seen is just what happens when workers are forced to go to work without proper protection. a global pandemic drives on the point it is public health

and we need to be sure we are doing what we can both as a matter of worker protection. we cannot stop the spread it is a key prerequisite to keeping the economy back on track i will see there is a very important role the workplace standards to do outreach to support employers that are working to put standards in place those in the pandemic for the need for help in trying to figure out what exactly needed to be done. so to that end we created the employer portal to allow employers to enter in addresses and zip codes of the industry and the polls for

guidance and workplace specific guidance and california public state guidance for a roadmap for employers what is site specific plan works like. so to give employers the tools and guidance to protect workers. i know that this is something that the department is still working on. and the results of their work and consideration over the last couple of months will be imminent. >> i went to continue on the topic of worker safety. the covid-19 pandemic has worsened many issues that healthcare in service workers were experiencing before the

pandemic began. according to the gao they experienced violence at 12 times the rate of the overall workforce. my workplace violence prevention for healthcare and social service workers act would direct osha to create a standard to better protect these workers. we you commit to placing this

safety issue back on the department agenda and work with this committee to help tackle the issue of violence in the workplace? >> my time is up i will say i definitely agree that preventing violence in the workplace is important and look forward to working with you on that issue >> senator cassidy. >>. >> senator cassidy is not in line now senator king. >> thank you i enjoyed our visit the other day. i think the questions that are asked about the fraud issues are important. but i do want to share a virginia perspective because we were given similar challenges. at the time the pandemic had passed, record low unemployment also led in

virginia and california staffing levels have dropped significantly as the unemployment rate had come down for a number of years. congress, wanting to do the right thing did three things to put significant burdens on her agencies. first we expanded the unemployment benefit

to the additional $600 a week but that was the initial challenge with the state normal reimbursement rate and add 600 but then we extended the number of weeks someone could claim. that was the smart thing to do. the third thing that was challenging was that pua program which dramatically expanded universe of people who could get unemployment. i often heard senator warner say of the american workforce only about 30 percent fit within the traditional model because it was designed so long ago now gate workers and self-employed and sole proprietors the universe of people that are not in the system at all. acting quickly, we said this is a group of people that has a significant he - - need so as i understood your answer to senator collins question and it sounds like the fried are disproportionately in the third program that states offer benefits their massive universe of people. did i understand that answer correctly. >> i enjoyed our conversation very much. that is exactly correct over 95 percent of the fraud we have experienced in california is in that pandemic unemployment assistant program by design for those that were not eligible for unemployment insurance and did not have the same checks

against employer or look at prior earnings at the outset of the program. >> so our design of it, again we were trying to act quickly because we needed it. i'm not saying we did anything wrong but that expansion at a time staffing levels were at historic lows created fried challenges in virginia and unacceptable backlogs my office was flooded with calls i can't get an answer. i think these are significant challenges and perhaps there has to be an answer how we dealt with it if we dealt with

it correctly or not but also an answer for us because one of the challenges coming out of the pandemic do we have a system designed for the 21st century or the 19 fifties. if a workforce is so proprietors and part-timers and gate workers that are not traditionally included than the question we have to grapple with is do we need to broaden the ui system? how do we avoid tried? how do we avoid acceptable waiting times for people to get benefits if we decide they are entitled? it's an important issue not just because of past performance but probably forward-looking reforms we might have to make with the experience of people flooding and you say muscle proprietor to give me a benefit and they are not. we have to have different fraud detection mechanisms to expand that way than traditional employees. if we do infrastructure economic recovery bill and i hope we do. . . . . to ensure ao

build enough housing, to ensure that we have roads and a transportation system and bridges that work and all of these opportunities to create good jobs in the communities that need them the most. i think that aligning the workforce system so we are

training for those jobs and assuring equity to those that face the greatest barriers who might otherwise be left out we have an opportunity to be thoughtful about all of those goals and i see them as opportunities and i look forward to working with you and others at the department of labor if i am confirmed. >> thank you, senator murkowski. >> thank you, madam chair thank you for the opportunity i appreciate the discussion you have raised today with regards to unemployment insurance and how we deal with matters of fraud. i think that the senator has raised in terms of recognizing that going forward we need to be looking structurally at that system built on a model that folks really didn't anticipate

in this nimble workforce of today. i didn't have an opportunity to speak to it in our conversation and i understand when you had a chance to visit with some of the staff here on the help committee, the issue of h2 a visas came up and that is something significant from my perspective with alaska's seasonal workforce and while that is something that isn't exclusively within the department of labor, it shares with homeland as well. that is a matter that we've struggled every season just about this time of year to ensure that we have the necessary numbers of workers able to come to the state for a

very reduced season, and working within the department of labor, with the folks over at homeland to assure that those are able to be issued is something that continues to be a priority. i wish i didn't have to come back every year and make the case and argument. we would like a permanent fix and hope we would be able to work with those within the department to achieve just that. just to follow on a little bit to what senator kane mentioned with regards to what we are seeing with the worker, the regulations we have in place currently which define employee versus independent contractor are ones that we see coming into play for discussion and creates debate from time to time. what steps, just general

conversation what would you do to address these regulations as they relate to definitions of employee versus independent contractor? >> thank you for the conversation we had prior to the hearing. so, i think that it's very important. i think every worker that goes to work they know they will be protected by minimum wage and overtime laws and they know that they will be protected by workplace health and safety laws and if they are injured, they have workers compensation and if they are unemployed, they get the unemployment insurance benefits. and so the question is important to the basic protections in the

workplace. i will also say that in my years of working in government, i've met with thousands of employers all of whom speak about the need for the level playing field who say that it is extremely difficult to comply with labor laws if the competition evades the same law creating a race to the bottom. i think that these issues are at the heart of the question that you asked. if confirmed, i would work closely with the listener and the staff at the department of labor to be thoughtful to seek input about guidance. and i think that the principal of the worker protection and level playing field are so important especially as we look at what it means to build back better. on the question of h2 i would

work with the department to ensure we have both timeliness and consistency of consideration and similar to your state and others. >> my time is just about expired. to the point about the workforce and workforce development, we have good strong training programs within the state. they do a great job. we have job core that we think should be more of a model around the country in terms of how we ensure workers trained for the jobs that are available but would hope you would have an opportunity to look at some of the successes we have with our specific job training. thank you madam chair. a. >> we will turn over to the senator. >> thank you chair mary and ranking member. thank you, secretary, for being

here today and for your willingness to serve. i want to start with two questions about retirement and then a couple of others if we get through those. the united states department of labor is tasked with helping workers save for retirement and retirees protect and utilize their savings. we know that americans of all ages are struggling to save for retirement and many american workers and retirees are at risk of outliving their retirement savings. one recent survey found one in five americans in their 70s have less than $50,000 saved deputy secretary of labor, what policies would you focus on to help american workers save more for retirement? >> thank you, senator. this is such an important issue. americans work so hard so that they can have a safe and secure retirement. i know from, again, my mom's experience the pension that

allows she and my father to live in retirement is absolutely critical to their health and well-being. the issue you are raising was so important making sure that the employees who have been paying into the retirement and relying on their pensions get them is very critical and it also needs to get the kind of advice to invest in the retirement and the best way possible for themselves and if confirmed, i look forward to being briefed on the rulemaking process on this issue and to understand what we can do to better protect the retirees, which is a basic fundamental mission of the retirement.

>> in addition to helping save for retirement we have to work to protect from potential cyber security threats. yesterday, following the request for myself, chair mary and the house education labor chair, bobby scott, the government accountability office released a report highlighting the threat cyber attacks posed to retirement plans. the report confirmed they put the retirement plans like 401k held by more than 1 million of americans at risk and recommends the department of labor take action to address this issue. i believe the congress must do everything we can to prevent against these cybersecurity risks. as the deputy secretary of labor, what policies would you focus on to help ensure the security of the retirement plans? >> i think that issue of ensuring against cyber attacks, we certainly had to see and again in the last year and even

in the conversation just how important that is. and i would, again, seek a full briefing from the department on the steps that are already in place during the assessment along with the secretary on whether how we make sure we consider this a very high priority. especially as we know that the president has actually called for providing almost all workers with access to a 4o1k of some sort. so i think that it absolutely will be a priority for me and for the department it's going to take convening not only government experts and agencies but the private sector, tomac because this has to be a joint effort and it's important to the economic security of so many americans. the point of creating more of these partnerships especially things like this where there is tremendous expertise in the private sector bringing that to

bear as is also important and i look forward to learning about the partnerships and building on those and also finding with the gaps and making sure that we fill them. >> let's turn to one other issue quickly. as the secretary of the workforce development agency, you have first-hand experience executing traditional unemployment insurance programs and expanded benefits to the state level. while states have primary responsibility for distributing unemployment insurance, the department of labor plays a significant role as well. based on your own experience, how can the department better support states administering the programs and should congress consider reforms to improve the administration upon unemployment insurance going forward? >> this connects to the point about how it works and how it

doesn't. at the first level providing guidance is critical to the states and i have seen firsthand how and because it is a federal state program, on the administration benefits and fight against fraud in a collaborative way i enjoyed our conversation on the phone. just to follow up a little bit on what the senator said she asked regarding how to better support to return to an earlier line of questioning by others.

to hear your straightforward response to this is the office of inspector general in may of 2020 released 1.2 billion paid out in march and april were the potentially fraudulent and it seems as if these red flags are being raised and were not addressed by the department in california until august, 2020, at which point the $600 million stimulus had will run out. it kind of begs the question why did your agency not respond more quickly, and if they have to do more, what more should they do to have the agency be more responsive? >> thank you for the conversation. i think on those questions, again, the perfect storm of challenges that we face the

federal department itself has been evolving over time. the estimate at the beginning has gone up because they have seen that the massive attacks were not the typical kind of fraud. >> as i understand the specific things pinpointed was the identification requirement for identification. that seems as if it would be roughly scalable that yes, we have a lot more, but we still have to check your identity because if it is few or many we have to know if it is somebody truly that exists that is applying. and they flagged that so going

back to my question, what could they have done differently and why was there such a hesitancy in your department to respond to the warnings they did get? >> that question goes to senator keynes point. the concern raised is because by design, the pandemic program was meant to pay out to individuals that were not eligible and who did not have either employer records, which the traditional system of checks against, or prior earnings which the traditional system guards against. as i mentioned in california that kind of fraud was comparable to the prior years. massive fraud was in a system that was by design it did not have those in place and i believe what they were doing is raising the concern about that. the other vulnerability in the system is what was known as

automatic backdating when the somebody applied it, they could get benefits back to the beginning of the pandemic and it was that vulnerability that became exploited and now the rules at the time or automatic backdating. once we saw the spike in those now, the rule dol had at the time was automatic backdating.f in the first weeks of septemberl we shut down automatic backdating. that, then, triggered department of labor followed by instructing all states to do so. so, again, i am -- you know, i e think that w this is a front on the battle that we have to bring, you know, build -- buildn a table with experts. so to really be smart about how we address them. t collaborate between the states sohe but a that states are not the battle, on their own. the but at the end of the day, truly, understanding what happened and why it happened is going to be very important let for -- for -- for fixing the problem. >> next, let multi me ask, the k regards to multiemployer pension

funds, who senator just raised. what i -- because, i think you will be part of thatth process.. the 86 billion in debt was wiped away, but no structural changesi were ngmade. we could begin reaccumulating that debt. ideas do you have, that could prevent us from just n getting another 86 billion until we blow out spending, sometime in the future, and don't pay for it in a way to clear the debt? >> so, willsenator, without a c time left to address that, fully, i will say -- i will commit to working on that issueh if confirmed. i think that relates to my hings general a approach, which is th i do think we haveex tope solve problems before they become bigger problems. and being clear eyed and being thoughtful, and bringing experts to the table, be to really prir understand the problem, how we m got there.he job and how we prevent it in the future, i would assure you, would be a priority of mine in my approach to the job, if i am confirmed. >> okay. thank you.back. i yield back. >> thank ouru. senator murphy. >> thank you, very much, madam

chair. welcome, thank you for your prior service, and your willingness to serve at the federal level. topic i wanted to stay on the topic of your service, in california. but on a different subject. and, that is, a law that some california's had on the books for a while. effectively, banning the use of something called non-compete agreements. non-compete agreements cover, today, about 20% of u.s. employees. they impact low-skilled and ey e low-wage workers, just as they impact higher-scale and higher-wage workers.nd g and they are,iv inherently, noncompetitive. they effectively give employers a veto right, over an employee's right to choose where they workn this is becoming a real area of bipartisan agreement. we have legislation modeled after california's, in congress now, that's supported by a bipartisan coalition of senators. and so, i'm -- it -- while this

is, you know, probably, an issul that will be more likely the regulated by the ftc than labora the department of labor still bt has the ability to glean information about the impact oft non-competes. president biden ran on a promise to address this issue. so, i wanted to ask you about what your experience is, in comn california, with a fairly te to rigorous restriction on non-compete agreements? and whether you would be willing to work with the committee and n with the senate, to at least make sure the dol provides relevant information to help us make a decision, moving forward, onon this issue. i >> yes, thank you so much, senator. so, absolutely, yes, to working together on this issue, if i am confirmed.good i think, this is one of those examples of how something that'e good for workers is, actually, also, good for employers.the tae the ability for employers to, you know, attract and train them talentpo that they need. i think it's just a very important part of, again, you s know, the -- the -- the many

areas of common ground that, when we do something that protects workers. there is, also, a benefit to employers. so, absolutely, yes, to working on the issue together. >> and -- and my sense is that, in california,, you've found that the existing protections for intellectual property and trade secrets is sufficient, in ordera toving make sure that employees leaving, you know, one firm thar is highly dependent on ip itesn't take it and bring it, illegally, n to another company. it's important, for folks tore t remember that just because the o non-compete agreement may not bl available to an employer, they aren't bereft of other mechanisms to stop the illegal transfer of intellectual property. is that correct? >> absolutely, toon is rsenatos >> theue second topic that i wanted to touch on is related o this issue of unemployment. h but specific to the issue of long-term unemployment. a we have a workforce training agency, in connecticut, called b the liworkplace.

that was -- has been featured ie national publications and national media because they have, specifically, attacked this issue of long-term he unemployment with a program called platform to employment. f and it recognizes the fact thatt for folks that have been out ofr thets workforce for a very long time. for years, in some o cases. there are all sorts of ancillarm effects to that individual and to that family. that have to be dealt with, in order to get them back into the workforce.ion of and i think we're going to be n looking at a very large population of long-term you loo unemployed, once we finally turn the corner. is this something that you you looked at, specifically, in a targeted way, in think californ? do you thinkut the it's worthwho the department of labor to think about the specific population of individuals who have been out of the workforce for a stati long ? and frankly, right now, don't even show up on ourtform statist and -- and -- and and look at programs, like platform to work employment, others that have had success in rooting people back

into the workforce. >> that's right. thatk you, senator. yes, i think that it is, definitely, a population that needs and deserves ourhere w attention. again, especially, comingvi outo theut pandemic. where we have seen long periods ofas unemployment for individua and, frankly, people dropping wo out of the labor force, as a result.men disproportionately, women workers. on tso, i think, that there is a tremendous need to target our work-force programs on those, ,n who face thenova greatest challenges. and the long-term unemployed are st tainly one of those.e. i would also note there are wht innovative and effective all programs in your state and other states that we ought to be nersi building on. in california,ps too. we have invested in, what we call, high-road training partnerships.manageme they're really demand-driven partnerships between employers and employees. where industry comes together, business, management, labornd o community colleges, and other education institutions and community-based organizations, to support people.force a

who -- who are -- who -- who arr trying to get into the a workforce.e.fa andmi creating opportunities fo high-road jobs, where people cao actually support a family. and lift themselves out of poverty. and so, i d uplithink,ca findine innovations and figuring out how we -- how we duplicate them, where appropriate, is something i would love to do. and i know that there are models in your state that we could use. >> it's great to a hear. platform to employment has an 80% success rate. and some economists suggest onei out of three jobs.blem that have w disappeared during e pandemic. aren't coming back. so, this is going to be a problem, that we all have to deal with. thank you, madam chair. >> thank you, senator murphy. senator smith. >> thank you, madam chair. and ranking member burr. it's great to be with everyone. and secretary su, i am and so h to y see you here. and grateful for your e you willingness to serve. and just want to thank you, so much, and congratulate you on your nomination. i'm struck, listening to this

conversation and the questions from my colleagues. about how important the department of labor is right now, and how the department of labor was envisioned as an agency that is an advocate for working people. and how crucial that is, especially as we emerge from covid. a pandemic, that has laid bare so many of the inequities in our system. and a pandemic that has had particularly hard impact on -- on women and people of color. so, i, for one, am really grateful for your leadership, your management experience, and the capacity that you can bringo to this role. i want to just take a minute of my time, also, to note that -- n how exciting it is that we havew finally made progress in the wh american rescue plan.ure on passing, essentially, the o butch lewis act, which will ensure that retirees and people who have counted on their ed tha pension through a multi-employer pension plan,is is know that t pensions are going to be secure.

this is something that i worked on carefully and hard with able senator brown and senator baldwin and many others. so, it is fantastic that we have been able to get this done. and it is going to make such a difference to the 22,000 minnesotans, who count on the central states pension for their safe and secure retirement. and for thousands and thousands folks more around the country. so, i just wanted to take a moment to -- to mention that. secretary su, you -- i want to ask you a question about wage theft. according to the economic-policy institute, americans lose three-times more in wage theft, than they do in street robberies, bank robberies, gas-station robberies, and convenience-store robberies, combined. and this is, of course, m disproportionately impacting te low-wage workers, women, and workers of color, who are, more often than not, the victims of wage theft.n calif

i understand that you have done a lot of work on this,it inh california. so i wonder if you could share with us how you think aboutnk te theft. and what do you think the department of labor should be n doing to better stop it? >> well, thank you so much, senator. and actually, that statistic is one that i used when i was leading, what's the equivalent of the department of a labor's o wage division in california. both, as a grounding and as a motivation for the importance of our work. so, thank you for that.wage t i think that wage theft is one of those phenomena that goes fundamentally disrupts the basic thomise of our society. that somebody who goes to work should be paid what -- whatve - what they were promised. and so, i think, the department of labor has a very important role to play. again, in california, i launch add wage-theft-is-a-crime

campaign, when i -- when i oversaw that department. and what we did was we eliminated the random, t scattershot inspections. w i don't think that it'she beneficial, for employees or employers, or, frankly, for government, when our investigations are random. i thinkhose who it's really impo focus on those, who willfully ht break the law. and make sure that -- that we send a clear message that that's not going to be tolerated. i also think it's very important su put the right tools in the i hands of our staff. when i had that position, in ts filifornia, i vested in technology. in makingployees sure that we ho tablets in the field. making sure that employees haveh what they need to do their jobso effectively. and then, we engaged in outreach with employers and with employees. to make sure thatane people kne what the rules were, that they were supposed to play by. effec and that we were hearing about the effects of our enforcement. so i think it's a really

important priority for, a very important responsibility of thed department, and i understand it is one whereed i we could -- wh we could -- it could use some -h some attention.gain and ifst confirmed, i would loo forward to bringing a strategic and thoughtful approach to the fight against wage theft. >> thank you. and i look forward to working you with -- working with you on that. you were talking about the value of technology. i totally ofnt. agree with you on that. and also, the importance of thy enforcement. if there isn't good enforcements then people will continue to trh to push, you know, employers, the bad employers, will continue to try to push the rules. and too often, working people e justms don't have the -- the por to protect themselves, in these circumstances.t the and i, also, agree with you on the power of communications. to thank y make sure that emplo employees understand what's happening, and how they can fight it. very much. uou >> thank you.u.sena >> thank you. senator burr, did you have additional question?

or -- >> actually, go to senator rosen. sorry. >> okay. senator rosen. >> thank you, madam chair, fora appreciate it.rd and thank you, ms. su, for being here, for stepping forward to serve. for your inspiring, family muchy story. i really enjoyed our conversation. and i know how much you'll do te support working families, who really are the backbone not just of nevada but of this entire nation. they make ourrtainm tourism, hospitality, our entertainment . economy possible, for my home state, and i look forward to do working with you. but we have a lot of work to do. and i like to focus a little bit on cyber to stem workforce ten because one of the things i really enjoy talking with you f about is apprenticeship programs, particularly in the i.t. and cyber-fields. we tend to think of apprenticeships as just relating to building trades because they work so well there. g but i believe we really could

expand the model to strengthen the pipelines in theepeop criti i.t. and cybersecurity ed for industries. this is going to give more young people a chance at these good-paying jobs or folks that want to be retrained for jobs.ou and i look forward to working with you on that, when you're confirmed.d. so, can you talk about some of the work you did in california, in this field? and how you will work to scale these programs, at a federal level. we all care about much apprenticeships. how do we expand these topic opportunities in our states? o >> yes. thank you very much for that, senator. trainin i would say, that this topic of workforce development and job-training programs, and how we invest in -- in those who need jobs, came up in nearly-every one of my conversations with the senators on this committee. and so, i -- i look forward, if confirmed, to working with everybody on -- on -- on these really important issues. in terms of apprenticeships, yor are absolutely right. inia it's loved our conversatios it.ay and i think, yous tha know, i h

certainly found, inn california that it iseeds one of the stron ways we have.nd both, to meet the needs of employers and to create pathwayy for -- for individuals who might not, otherwise, have the opportunity into good jobs. and as you said, apprenticeships in the building trades have really set the gold standard.y o and -- and created an opening for us to look at how we utilize thee modelel of learn and earn. how we help people, who, otherwise, wouldn't be able to stop working or to get trainingg to -- to train for -- for good-paying, middle-class jobs. and i think, a big part of making apprenticeships work is the epartnership, is creating alignment between employers, the employees. education institutions. community-based organizations. and -- and -- and -- and to create systems that really support the needs of employers d and the needs of to employees f jobs. i know, i have got talked to apprentices, who got out of a domestic-violence situation because they were given a chance

to be an apprentice. a who lived in homeless shelters e but, through an apprenticeship, found a job working at a high-end hotel astr a cook. you know, i mentioned high-road training partnerships, earlier. we have hospitality-training academy. a partnership with local -- with unite here local 11, which has trained individuals for hospitality jobs.e and so, to your point, senator, about cybersecurity. i think that's one of those f we in-demand jobs that are good-paying jobs and there are jobs that have already been t identified as if we're not deliberate about diversity and , access for communities. then, it will not happen on its own. so, w apprenticeships is a way us to make sure that we create equal access to -- to these n't jobs. and i have, certainly, talked to apprentices, for whom, you knowr their time in school, high school, it didn't make sense to them why they were learning about right angles. or -- or measurements. but when you put them into a -- into an apprenticeship, where

they are really learning how these things i -- apply in the world, it makes a really big difference. and so, i am very supportive. >> really quickly, with the minute i have left. because women have been hit thee hardest in this pandemic. you were talking about it. apprenticeships. retraining people, or training people. but i want tore touch on returnships. where we create. pathways for p mid-career workers who return ta the workforce. f we know thisor pandemic's reall impacted women. their ability to vereturn, mayb after having to step away for childcare or other caregiving. i have a restart program, that would bridge the gap between workers who are more likely to be long-termhis of unemployed a underrepresented in s.t.e.m. and so, i would love tha to tal you about this idea not just off apprenticeships but returnships for that mid-career worker, whot really needs to retool, for a he variety of reasons. i or jobs now that may not even

come back after the pandemic. >> i think there is a spectrum, right, from preapprenticeships talkingngab about. upward mobility. all, very, very important. thank you. t >> thank you very much. i really look forward to workina with you, and my time is expired. >> thank you, senator rosen. we'll turn to senator marshall. >> i thank the chair and welcome, as well.ent i think, my first question, as o potentially to be the deputy k secretary of department of labor, your state -- your state of california, like our state oe kansas, really struggled with dn fraud in the unemployment d insurance. really struggled. continue to struggle. what lessons did we learn?elp sp and what -- what was the cause of it? and under your new leadership, what would you do to help stop the fraud? >> thank you, so much, senator. so, yes. i -- what i have described is really a perfect storm during this pandemic.heel of very high demand for to benefits, on the heels of very low levels of unemployment. which, in the ui world,

translates into very low levelse of staffing. and then, on top of that, infrastructure and capacity issues.s importa and i think, all of those n provide important lessons. and then, on top of that, we have to layer what you have hit mentioned. i know you experienced in yourr state. we didnd in ours, of course. and it really hit, state after state, the -- the criminal sco enterprise type of fraud,pe rig? i think it's so important to h understand just the scope and a the scale and -- and the relentlessness of the kind of fraud that we faced. which is a different animal, really, than what thehe unemployment insurance system was built to prevent. i will answer this question with what i think are four -- four l' gusic lessons. the first, as i talked about earlier, is i do think the gram department of labor's consistent and clear guidance about what e states need to do tos s implement benefits programs. especially, new-benefits tical. programs, at the federal level,n that have not beend in place before. are -- are -- is really critical. that kind of guidance has to cs come out timely. it has to be clear, and it has to be -- and it has to stay consistent.s those just

the second is those investmentsn in infrastructure. and by this, i m mean,ade i tec, but not just technology. in fact, in many of the states where technology upgrades have been made, they were still hit by the kinds of fraudbl schemest that we're talking about. so, it's the ability to create a flexible, reliable system, that works. but that is, also, nimble enough to respond to -- to what we've seen, over the last year. the third is that, i think, we -- we need a coordinated response to the fraud that recognizes it was a national ue problem. it has been called the a biggest-fraud scheme in united states' history. nauld national b threat. and it needs to be responded to, stth a national response. now, it should be done as a c federal-state partnership. but, you know, the states have struggled against significant odds to process the hat unprecedented volume of claims and implement new programs and i think would welcome that kind ou partnership with the federal government.

and the last piece i would justw say is we still have t tohe pay attention to equity, in all of y this. right? we saw that h the pandemic disproportionately hit african-american, latino workers, pacific-islander workers, women workers. and our unemployment-insurance e benefits system has to be aware of, and responsive to, those kinds of needs. and, you know, applies, also, tr rural workers. >> i need to move on to the next question, if you don't mind.ruge so, thank you for that answer.ey our state of kansas, our governor, also, struggled mightily in getting out the unemployment insurance benefits. it's the number-one complaint we get from kansans. typically, still, getting 15 complaints, a day. story after story. people crying and call and say, look, we don't have money to pay for our electricity. enough money to go get ceries groceries. waiting on those. unemployment y checks, still.improv so, here is fraud happening. the people who need it aren't ii getting it.on as would you add anything else to -- to what you would do to improve that situation, as well?

other than the four points you already made. >> well, i -- i -- i tha just -g know, i agree.e. i thinknk that was the challengr and i think that understanding the multiple reasons why that happened. but your point is that, you ensn know,nefits there is a sort of attention, right, between paying benefits out quickly to those i who need them. and stopping the fraud in the unemployment-insurance system is a -- is a constant effort to make sure that we do both of those things well. i would say that, you know, the priorities that i raised. but other ideas that i know, you know, this committee is likely to have based on the multiple experiences in your state. i would, veryryne xt imuch, wel conversations about how we tackle it. >> okay. next, i just want to go, really, at a high level. at least 20,000-foot-high level. maybe, even higher. right now, employers are trying to figure out how to make a safe work environment with covid. and we realize, the science is t not hasettled.d. the science is never settled. with viruses, they -- the only predictability about them is they're unpredictable. 6

we've been told to wear f one e mask, two masks, three masks. we have been told to have our es kids three-foot apart, six-foott apart. and the truth is we don't know. that we are shooting from the hip. the science is really a stretch, for the have most part. but your guidance to employers is going to have a huge impact. like, you set the gold standardo you set theu de bar. this is what an employer needs to do. at you know, just kind of describe how you look at that situation. maybe, not real specifically. but just, what rules will guide you? your values? yeah. >> so, i think that's right, senator. we have to be based in science. we have to be based on our evolving understanding of the -- of the virus that we face. and -- and i agree with you, that, that is why, as clear of k guidance as we can put out. so that employers know what they need to do to keep their employees safe. but also, themselves, right? it's required, in order for them toan keep their businee operating. it is just -- it's very y important for us to be based in science. and then, to make sure that we r are doing as much as outreach ae

we can. who so that employers understand their obligations. and then, as i talked about nt m earlier, creating tools for ciee employers who are struggling to comply to do so. >> yeah. my -- my point i am trying to make is there's not good science. and you try to apply the science. but i -- butth theank science y getting now is not the gospel. half of it's wrong, and i just k don't know which half. so, thank you so much for being here. thank you and hicken i yield ba >> thank you, very much. senator hickenlooper. >> nation to be -- oh. sorry about that. i'm going to get this on to muting/un-muting, eventually. first, i want to congratulate you, ms. su, on your nomination to be dep -- deputy secretary.r, it's a tremendous honor, obviously. and as you being the child of immigrants, it is a great, inspirational message to -- to people all over this country. and i know that you're going to

bring the same passion and our experience to your new role. i listened, with interest, to your discussion with senator ae rosen. about apprenticeships.ntps and i -- you know, i -- i come t in from a slightly different point of view. with the recognition that almost half of the american workforce is in small businesses. and yet, 70% or over 70% of all-american workers actually had their first job with a -- with a small business. but we know that that growth is hindered when those positions that need to be filled need technical training or some, you know, some form of certification. i think, small businesses in healthcare, in technology, echnl manufacturing, computer technology. these, all, need some sort of support, in getting skilled workers. so, especially when they are --

when they are small businesses.t so, are there -- well, let me say -- how -- are there ways that the -- that the public sector can assist private at a industry, in these cases?n for the challenge, would one ofr those ways then be looking at a new form of apprenticeship and what that might mean for providing skilled employees to small businesses? >> well, thank you, very much, senator. yes. i think that the apprenticeship model could, certainly, apply there. you know, apprenticeships are win/wins. and -- and looking atf em howpl might meet the needs of employers of all sizes and industries, like manufacturing, right? and like, you know, our conversation earlier about infrastructure. where are the jobs that we -- n that we have? and how do we create opportunities for people to be those jobs and to do creat them. i also think that there aredgesi opportunities for government to. help create bridges, right?

a lot of our work is about aligning systems.ments w so, when you do have private industry that says i have a need for these workers. can loo most of our small so the investments we have to make trae by site are high. nee we can look at opportunities to createate broader-training effoo for multiple employers and smaln employers that would help to meet their needs. and again, create thoseor opportunities for good jobs for people. again, who might not, otherwise, know about those jobs. or might not, otherwise, acquire the skills for them. gear >> great.s we agree on that. let me switch gears, a little bit. back when i was a mayor, and -- and that's a long time ago -- we became aware of critical shortages in -- in various industries for workers. but at the same time, we saw, again and the lac again, the -- the lack of utilizing our senior

workforce. and i think, part of that is -- comes back to the -- the skills training that's hard to figure f out, how do we get people, that are mid-career or towards the tt end of their career, to get refreshed on -- on skills training. about so that they are able to -- to s take on some of these jobs where we clearly have a need. and i think senator rosen talked about this as well. but this is kind of a different -- different aspect of that. >> yeah, senator. that's right.ortuni i do think that is, though, another important aspect of the -- of the opportunities and -- and training that's's needed. i know, we talked about this in our conversation. and i i appreciated that, you know, in california, we have what is called a master plan on aging. which is meant to look at the needs of older californians. and there is, both, the need on the -- you know, it -- it raisen all kinds of questions around rc

care. but it, e also, what raises alle questions for people staying in the workforce longer. and what are the supports that are needed? what are the, you know, training as -- as conditions in the workplace evolve? and i think those are all a really important part of our could landhallenges if that -- that, if confirmed, i would love to work with you on. and also, work with the good staff in the department on. >> great. thank you. i look forward to working with t you. i've got 20 seconds. if you can, very concisely, just talk a little bit about the -- the skills gap in cybersecurity, in terms of small businesses. and, kind of, a commitment to kind of help us tackle that. >> is right.. so ----ar so, cybersecurity is n a -- you know, it has been growing. it is a growth area.curity there are tens of thousands of s cybersecurity jobs in large and small businesses, public and private, throughout the united states. opportunity to uld be create a skilled workforce, for those good, high-paying jobs.o and i'd be very committed to working on that issue.

>> great. b thank you so much. i yield. >> thank you. senator braun. >> thank you, madam chair. secretary lu, enjoyed our conversation. we covered a wide range of topics. i think itmi went up to a half-an-hour. so, i know we only got five a minutes here.nd o you've come from a unique spot, one ing labor secretary in of the largest economies in the world. i'd love to know what you think has worked well, in california,u that you'd like to see happen on a federal basis. and i'd like you to, also, put r it in context. where my own company that got ti california roughly-ten years ago. we recognize it as a fairly t state when it comes to regulations of allo sorts.

so i think your report card would be graded by how many businesses choose to move into a state? versus, moving out. maybe, it's mostly anecdotal. but from our own experience, we would say that it's not, said, necessarily, a business-friendly environment. that being said, tell me what you think you have done well in california, what you think you poorlyy at. and what you want to bring to the federal level. s >> well, thank ayyou, so much, senator. and i -- i will say that just i going back to our -- our conversation. one of the things you mentioned was that, when you were hiring, you found there were more people with college degrees than needed. skaning, we need to make sure that those without college degrees have the skillsil neede for the jobs in their area. i agree with the importance of e that point. and that's why, i think, that we need to focus on, and we have i

california. this is one of our essuccesses,, for lollege i sure.ob is looking at alternativeust degrees, right? tha looking att two-year colleges. we have a very robust community-college system that we partner with, a lot, on -- on the workforce side of things. we need to look at other kind of credentials and certificates that, both, meet short-term -- you know, the -- the -- the need to employ quickly. and -- and the -- the many, kind of, desires and directions of -- of -- of jobseekers. so, i think that's one area, that i would -- i think where we would have some common ground. and if confirmed, would be interested in working with you on for the experiences in your state, in meeting the needs of employers and of employees. i'll say another thing about, is kind of, growth of business in california. onet of the things that -- that i've seen in my work is that we -- i mean, we have all kindso of business. both, that start there and --

and come there.ood but one reason businesses come d to california is because of the opportunity, both, to do well t and to do good. tra and so, we have, because of our training systems in place, especially, again, for people who, oftentimes, would strugglee to get -- get a job, at all. we are working with a business now, who is interested in hiring. but also, hiring formerly-incarcerated individuals. and so, we have and a sec train program for those individuals so that when they come out, they can actually get a job and get a second chance. and -- and find security and succeed. and so, i think, having training programs for the need. but for communities, who will tt benefit from them thehe most, is -- is really important. something, that i would hope to bring to the job. and something that i think, not only california but, california, has some models for. >> i'm glad you brought that up, because my experience, back in

indiana, was that we were ut the wrestling with the department of education. that was, actually, throughout the system, stigmatizing that pathway of just-better-high-school skills. and the need to nurture, as gin little education, for those high-demand, high-wage jobs, f a given thelt cost of how that ha now eclipsed the cost of healthcare in terms of annual increases. so, good, it seems like, in de california at least, on workforce development. sounds like, that is something that we could -- you're doing well there.us let's get to another item of big versus small. comes to large business, versus small business. and i know, your roots are from the small-business world. mine, as well. cal do you thinkif there is a place whether it be in california or at the federal level, that you'd differentiate on how you treat, through laborru practices, throh

rules and guidelines, to make it easier to -- for small businesses. especially, how they've been it traumatized through the whole journey through covid. is there a way to do that and, yet, make sure that you have tha practices that need to be rge bu universal there. is there a way to differentiatei because, i think, large businesi and small business have different characteristics. >> yes. mythink that's very important, senator. i know, you know, d when i was e growing up, my dad worked, side by side, with hishe employees. and so, you know, as we talked t about on the trainingng side. i think that there's some investments that small so businesses -- it's -- it's harder for them to make.ng and so, are there ways that we can serve multiple employers, by meeting an industry's needs? i think there is, also, the issue of outreach and education. that is primarily -- really, important for all businesses but especially small businesses who may not have the same level of,

you know, legal department, an hr department. and so, we've really, in my time in leadership, focused on m outreach to small businesses. sr i know, during the pandemic, we have tried toere make sure that supports and assistance to businesses were targeted to apil small f businesses. who, also, might no have the capital, for example, right, hat to -- to -- to last through the crisis that this pandemic has created. so, i do think that we have to look at the real needs, on the ground. as you mentioned, you know, through my personal history, i have -- i have a real sensitivity to that. and i -- i -- i do think it's y very important for us to be your thoughtful in oure approach.n t onehe other thing, senator, to your point. your earlier point. i think, you'rehere's an absolutely right and that, on the workforce side of things, there's such an if co opportunity for collaboration between the department of laborf department of education. and ifif very confirmed, i would b very excited to work with my counterpart, at the department

of education. so that, our education and laboi priorities, from a workforce perspective, are aligned. >> do i have any time left? >> no, you -- you're two-minutes over. >> okay. way it seemed that way. thank you. >> thank you.. thank you, so much. senator scott.t.thank >> thank you, madam chair. secretary su, thank you for youe willingness to serve as -- in this very important role.ector a and i'm a person that comes fros the small-business sector, as an employer. i remember, growing up, as a kid, and earning less than the minimum wage. and becoming an employer who paid more than the minimum wagey i look at the labor from the president and yours in california. and it, of t really, is very esl concerning to me, what the impact of the president's rtantl policiesy, will be on small owners. but more importantly, small-business employees and ye independent contractors. having been an independent contractor, myself, for seven

years of my professional life. i will say, withoutut any question, some of the things i really enjoyed about being an independent contractor was the i ability tode have a flexible-wo schedule. s to decide when i come and when i go out. and one of the things that th stands in the way ofat thats ise abc test in california. it seems like, if you are a champion of -- of small businest and understand the importance of independent contractors. your position, as a champion, not just an enforcer, but a vocalalst champion, of the abc test.ependent it is in stark contrast to what so many independent contractors wanted.t biden if you apply that test nationally, as -- as president biden has said he is committed a to doing. you would, forcibly, reclassify as many as half of all independent contractors, if not more. and jeopardize about 8.5% of our nation's gdp. the abc test would destroy many of these independent jobs.

prd kill the flexibility and the autonomy for many of the rest of those jobs. in addition to hiking consumer prices, despite the fact that moreli than nine out of ten stu independent contractors say thes actually like and prefer their status.t so, secretary su, you've calledo california's abc test law an s. important step to protect honest -- i'm not sure what that means -- businesses.s. disagree.ns they voted by a nearly-17-point margin, last year, to exclude at-base drivers from this test. and lawmakersrsha scrambled to include roughly 100 in the law.l have these developments caused you to rethink your outspoken support for the abc test? and should we be concerned thats you'll look tota nationalize th very unpopular standard? >> senator scott, i would say,

to your point about, what did i mean by honest businesses? i will talk about some of the businesses that i've actually met with. from barbers to janitorial contractors. for whom, the misclassification in their industry creates an artenable situation for these small e businessowners to contie to compete because they are being undercut, by another contractor, who says, well, the janitors show up. and they do the work at my direction. and, you know, they -- they s ad clean i these buildings overnig. but they're required to provide all their own supplies, and -- and -- and -- and i'm going to call them an independent contractor. i would, also, just note that it don't think that there is an inherent conflict between flexibility and worker protections. often i think that there can, and

often has, been both. and we've certainly seen that through the pandemic, right? f we have seen employers, in large lembers, move to more flexible work arrangements that, frankly, they didn't think possible. right? we've done that slowe at the st level. so -- so, undgovernment, which often, you know, slower to be flexible than the private sector. found thatd we could do that be -- because we needed to do it. so, for lookme, i -- what i'd really interested in working with you on, if confirmed, is really looking at how we think about flexibility and innovation. i'm sorry. >> let me -- let me -- thank you, ma'am, for your answer. and i would certainly say government is slower on almost everything, by the way. and i would agree with you there.s the i'd, also, agree with you that impo-- the federal employees did not face layoffs, whereas, the private sector did. and one of the things that happens when we impose mandates on the privatete sector is that they lack the tax base to b support their businesses.he they actually have to run theire

businessesy at profit. so given the type of flexibility sayt allows for them to pick and choose when they work, how they work. it's one of the why, ns nine out of ten of the independent contractors say, hey, wait, wait, wait, wait a second. i want to keep my status becausp it allows me to be autonomous.ts you can cherry pick examples. but the truth of the matter is n simple truth. which is that, if 90% of those folks in california disagree wl with your position. i can -- i can assure you that the nation,at progr as a whole,l that abc test as and frankly, independent contractors, who mint to divide their time any way they like. i -- i see my time is already out.nutes chair murphy, i'm not sure if that five-minute clock is really five minutes or if it's just two minutes. thank you so much. >> thank you. senator tuberville. >> thank you, chair -- chair lady. good morning.

>> morning. >> you're almost done. okay? just going to off the cuff heree for a second. you're getting ready to tackle, confirmed, one of the biggest w jobs our country's gonna face. putting people back to work.sign while your new boss, the in cha secretary, is going to be running around the country taking pictures and signing autographs.ey can e you're going to be in charge of 15,000 people. making sure that people have a job so they can eat and pay their rent for the first time. su organization is a key to success. you think you're ready for it?td >> i do, senator. i would not have accepted the oe nomination, if i did not think h was. >> it's going sta diffe to be h. each state's different, and you handled california. huge state. will you be able to handle the z smallere states? because you're going to have to make adjustments, because of the size and the people and -- and the -- the ability to have

people to work with, in someme n those smaller states because we're less funded. >> so, yes, senator. when i -- in my earlier comments, i talked about creating big tables. where we invite and give everyone a chance to be heard. i really do believe in that philosophy. in -- in any role. you know, as a manager, as a leader, as a government official. and so, i do believe that one of my strengths is -- is listening. and -- and being willing to and able to bring many people to -- to a conversation. i do think that -- that those are important traits, in terms of understanding what i don't already know. and i know there is a lot, in that area. >> would you promise, when confirmed and if confirmed, that you will work with workforce development across this country to get young kids ready to work? you know, most kids don't need to go to a four-year school. they need to go learn how to that use their hands. u

and we desperately need somebody in the labor department, that will stress workforce development on kids that don't want to go to college. but learn -- learn a skill.ose t and i think that's going to be very important. you know, in the next-ten years after coming out of thisc. pandemic. >> i would, absolutely, do that, senator. and look forward to working wite you on it. it's certainly been part of my role in california. to work directly with -- with the workforce system, including local-workforce boards. and i know, from your state and others, as i mentioned earlier. there are innovations and effective programs in place that we should look to build on andi and -- and expand. and possibly, model, right? m states sharing stories would be really valuable. but absolutely. i think that everythingou you'v said there is -- is important and be a priority for me. >> thank you very much. >> senator burr. >> thank you, madam chair, and i'll be brief.y, secretary, cal california legislature has just established a new program to provide $600

payments, with state money, to undocumented adults. my question is very simple. do you think that money could bo better spent on anti-fraud y sim efforts inpl the unemployment insurance, as you have expressed it needs? >> so, i would say that, the $600 program was meant, again, to meet the tremendous, ongoing, pandemic-induced needs of am california families.ilie i do not believe that the only,e or maybe even the best, solution for the massive fraud issues we have discussed here, at some length. is -- is just monetary. i think that what we've seen, and i have said this already, ii

apologize forng repeating mysel. is the need to understand the fullll complexity of why the s o unemployment-insurance system fell short of what we needed. why there was so much fraud? and frankly, a lot of those changes have been made, ranking-member burr. i'm not going to say -- >> i'm going to -- i'm going to- grant you that there was $20 billion that you considered to be fraud, that is tional nontraditional. but..10bill 10 billion was what called a system that was broken. my question is -- and you -- you didn't elect to fix it, while you were there. you were in the middle of a e in pandemic. now, california. the governorhe a just announceds gotten $10.3 billion more in revenue since he projected in n january. this is mid-march.h.januar in 60 days, they've found $10.3 billion worth of revenue. and the first thing that they do is to pass legislation to put a $600 check in the hands of undocumented adults. i'm not debating whether that'st

yorthwhile. i'm asking where the priority is, in california, were you still in charge, would you be fixing the system you just saidl wasio broken and that lost $10 b billion, not the 20 billion in -- in -- in -- in -- in fraud. >> well, so, senator, again, too be n clear, the $10 billion of confirmed fraud wassthe was overwhelmingly, also, in that pua program, right? the vulnerabilities and the ways that criminals exploited that program is, you know, we have to understand. >> should california fix their ui program? >> absolutely, we should fix ouo ui. >> and should that be a priority, from a that b standpoint fu of -- of funding?nding? >> absolutely, it is a priority. red again, i'm grateful to -- to --sc to the american rescue plan for having provided some resources for states. but i -- i guess, my point is that, i think that the problems, also, require thoughtful coordination. not just monetary investment. but -- but, of course, it's a

priority. >> we provided that money. ba.9 trillion. based upon what governors told us their revenue shortfalls were. yet, all of a has sudden, cting? california's got $10 billion in new revenue that they weren't projecting, 10.3, in -- in 60 days. they're flush with cash but it doesn't seem like they are but directing it to fixing a re problem. they're directing it to payouts to p toay individuals. point is, if it's a priority, if it's not a priority in california. how can i expect it to be a abu priority at the department of -- of labor?t ow isority i thank the chair. >> thank you, senator burr. secretary su, the long overdue national discussion of systemic racism, as well as the me too movement, has increased rampantr harassment and discrimination that many workers face oncaus td job because of their gender, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or religion. i introduced the be heard in the

workplace act to address harassment, including sexual assault in the workplace. and i hope, working with members of this committee, on both sides of the aisle, we can make some progress on that issue. because building an inclusive economy, in the midst of a head global pandemic means taking, s into account, the needs of all workers, and removing barriers t that too many peopleak hold bace as deputy secretary of labor, i. expect you would use the the a authority of the dol to respond to the impact the pandemic has had on women and workers of color. and to deal with the longstanding barriers that create unacceptable inequities in the workplace.and t can you give us some examples oh how you have approached those issues during your timew as ry f secretary of labor for california? >> so, yes.rnia?i agr thank you, senator. i agree, wholeheartedly, with your premise. we have, certainly, seen, during the pandemic, that the -- that m essentialse workers went to the workplace. put themselves at risk. and improbably, in many ways, women were disproportionately

affected. both, in terms of the industries that were most needed on the front lines. care work. in healthcare. and also, in jobs that were lost, that were devastated, by they pandemic. so like, hospitality and leisure and retail. and so, i think, that we need to make sure that the programs that we develop, in our -- in order to build back better. pay special attention to -- to the many ways that the pandemic has been particularly harmful to communities that were, already,. facing inequities before we came in. one of the areas of work, that i have -- have -- have engaged in, in california, is on pay equityg and so, before the pandemic, i

co-chaired a task force on pay equity. in which, we were charged with enforcing california's law or implementation of the law. and we spent a couple of years working, again, at -- at a als p table, across sectors. with employers and hr professionals, employees and ts unions, academics, businesses of various sizes. to look at the tools that wouldu be ctneeded, by both employers, you know, how to conduct a pay audit. how to understand, you know, whether you have pay inequity in the workplace. and for employees, you know, y n everything from understanding what you make. the to, we realized, through research, that women actually demand less at the outset of a job, when asked how much they needed to be paid. so, providing some education and outreach. so, i thinknk --omen and d then, on the last thing i'll say about that is that i do think that, for women, we have seen this in the pandemic. but it was true before, too. the challenges extend beyond work to, sort of, work-adjacent issues like childcare,

transportation. these things are, also, very important. i think those requireeres col d collaboration and coordination d with -- with other agencies. and if confirmed, i would, as i did in california, work with my counterparts at other agencies to address them. >> well, thank you very much. that will end our hearing, and i want to thankunterp myarm. com fellow-committee members for their participation in today's hearing. secretary su, thank you for taking the time to answer our faestions and speak about the challenges facing working families across our nation. i look forward to working with you to tackle those challenges, as soon as you are confirmed. for any senators, who wish to ask additional questions of thea nominee, questions for the record will be due byre d wedne, march 17th, at 5:00 p.m. the hearing record will remain open for ten days, for members who wish to submitit additionali materials foral the record.ule it is my intention to schedule a vote in committee on secretary's nomination as quickly as possible, so she can begin the important task of helping to ass lead the department ofsi labor.a meeting is now adjourned.

[inaudible conversations]

week nights this month, we are featuring american history tv programs as a preview of what's available every weekend on c-span3. tonight, u.s. capitol tour guide, robert poll, shares a few of his favorite, unconventional stories from his book "wicked capitol hill." an unruly history of behaving badly. he talks about the late-19th century fad of honeymooners visiting the capitol. the electric car that traversed the underground passage tss and a violent episode on the mini subway system. watch tonight, beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern. and enjoy american history tv, every weekend, on c-span3. thursday, national institutes of allergy and infectious diseases director, dr. anthony fauci. and cdc director, dr. rochelle walensky, testify with other-federal officials on the covid-19 response. watch live at 10:00 a.m. eastern on c-span3. online at cspan.org or listen,

live, with the free, c-span radio app. american history tv. on c-span3. exploring the people and events that tell the american story, every weekend. coming up, this weekend. saturday, at 6:00 p.m. eastern, on the civil war. a discussion on the october 1864 arrival of union general, john phillip sheridan at senior creek battlefield. sunday, at 4:00 p.m. eastern, on "real america." four films marking women's history month, including the 1987 film "crossing borders." and women in the family of man from 1971. at 6:00 p.m. eastern on american artifacts, a re-creation of the events of the assassination attempt on president ronald reagan by john hinkley jr. and 8:00 p.m. eastern on the presidency. author of "what jefferson read, ike watched, and obama tweeted."

exploring the american story. watch american history tv, this weekend, on c-span3. you're watching c-span3. your unfiltered view of government. c-span3 was created by america's cable-television companies. and today, we're brought to you by these television companies who provide c-span3 to viewers, as a public service. listen to c-span's podcast, "the weekly." this week, senior-research fellow of the mercatus center. on the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill and how it impacts the united states' already-growing federal debt. >> my big problem is that this is a massive bill. which amount and content is totally disconnected with needs

that are brought on by this pandemic. >> find c-span's "the weekly" where you get your podcasts. senate judiciary subcommittee, last week, held a hearing on whether tech giants, like google and facebook, have monopoly power. and whether they are violating anti-trust law. minnesota senator, amy klobuchar, chaired the hearing. >> all right. i have the gavel. we're gaveling the hearing to order. this hearing of the subcommittee, on competition, policy, anti-trust, and consumer rights. entitled, competition policy for the 21st century, the case for anti-trust reform. good afternoon, and welcome to our witnesses. i want to thank senator lee for his friendship. we have been working together for a long time, on these issues. and i look forward to that continuing.

i appreciate his passing of the gavel to me, whether it was voluntary, or not. and -- and i, also, appreciated his text last night, where he asked me if i should be called chair, chairwoman, appreciated his text last night where he asked if i should become, chair chairwoman, or klobuchar. -- the state of competition across our economy and to consider what can be done to preserve and foster competition in the 24 century. american prosperity of course was built on a principle of open markets and competition. it is competition between companies that give consumers lower prices, forcing manufacturers to constantly innovate and improve their products. it forces companies to pay fear wages because there is competition for those

employees. employ -- competition drives opportunities for employees to -- future economic growth, but if you look at our markets today we see big cracks in the free market foundation. we see more and more consolidation, in so many areas markets are not as competitive as they once were, and the devastating impact of covid-19 on small and medium sized businesses threatens to make things even worse. we lost hundreds of thousands of businesses. even well before the pandemic it was clear that america had a major monopoly problem. an example? more than two thirds of u.s. industries have become more concentrated even between the years of 1997 and 2012. now we all know that the problem is most obvious in technology industries. we thank our friends in the house.

chairman cicilline, chairman nadler for the here is that they conducted all last year, and the reports. i would suggest if you will read the report. at the root of this lies the ability of a few companies to act as gatekeepers. thanks to senator lee, we had a hearing on one of those gatekeepers, google, recently, last year which -- giving it the leverage to hold companies hostage, even recently we learned entire countries hostage by using its leverage to threaten the countries that we could just pick up the business in the search engine and go somewhere else. that my friends is a sign of a monopoly. if there was in fact greater competition in the tech market, you would see companies would come up with bells and whistles

that i think would remedy some of the problems that we have today. if there was true competition we could have small businesses, maybe they would have been instagram or whatsapp that could have risen, up developed bells and whistles. developed better privacy protections. developed better policies for handling this information. develop better arrangement for paying for content. but if you have big monopolies that buy up all of that potential innovation. that by all of those small companies, you lose the ability to get at those challenges. companies dominate markets, exclude their bun -- even what is known as nascent competitors. perhaps we should just look at the words of facebook had, mark zuckerberg, in his own email he said, this these businesses are

nascent, but the networks established the brand is meaningful and if they go to a large scale they could be very disruptive to us. disruption actually is a positive word in tech. disruption means that you are disrupting the status quo. that you are bringing in new ideas and new competitors. but in this sense, one zuckerberg looked at these smaller companies that were coming up to compete here that they would disrupt what? the monopoly power of facebook. as he wrote and another email, when you are building a monopoly it is better to biden to compete. at some point, and i say this to all of the senators on the subcommittee, we need to reply to those emails. not just by throwing hearings and throwing popcorn at whatever sea we want to throw popcorn. at not giving a sound bite at

the, day but by giving a, action responding with legislation. with all due respect to the views of the witnesses here today, i do not think that the status quo is going to do that for us. one of the points that we need to make today is that this isn't just about big tech. america's market power problem cuts across our entire economy. we see in agriculture. a number of republican senators just yesterday approached me about this. we see it in online travel, where when people go to the travel says they think they have all these great choices but they simply own the brand names under them. we see it in the live event industry, where one company dominates ticketing, event sponsorships and performance venue booking. we see it in everything from cat food to caskets. so it is no wonder why two

thirds of americans have come to believe that the economy unfairly favors -- interests. why is there a monopoly problem? a big reason is that the courts have become increasingly closed. off most recently ohio the american express have been forcing antitrust laws, more challenging. after that the fact that congress and multiple administrations have failed to ensure that antitrust enforcement budgets have kept up with the demand of a growing and increasingly complex economy. in 1980, when the justice department antitrust division was working to break up 80 and tee the division had 453 lawyers. for under 53 lawyers. by 2017 it hit 300 lawyers? the ftc's also a shadow of

itself. -- it has fallen to 1102 by 2018. our companies cannot fight the biggest companies the world has ever seen with duck tape and band-aids. i know that senator roughly who's been a great leader on this agrees, we've been trying to inject more investment in these agencies because we know that they deliver money when they bring these cases to the government. we know it is worth the money, and we also know that we can do in a that backs the taxpayers by simply changing the fees assessed on large companies. for them it is a drop in the bucket when they bring the mergers before agencies. the purpose of antitrust laws to protect competition. in america we see a problem and we take action. figure out what is and isn't working, and we fix it. that is why i introduced the competition on anti trust law enforcement and reform act with many people on this committee

including senator lee, he -- and booker, many on the committee have since joined. the bill would increase the baseline for anti agency budgets, stop harmful consolidation, outlaw exclusionary conduct, and i am talking about markets that are already concentrated and make other reforms to protect competition. i will and with this because with senator lee and i starting a new year and so much interest on the republican side as well as the interest we already have on the democratic side, this has always been a bipartisan issue. our founding fathers recognize the danger of monopoly power. -- partly motivated by british government granted monopoly on the tee trade, and america's long tradition of promoting pro competition policies have often been led by republicans. senator sherman of ohio is a

republican. teddy roosevelt most notably, the nation's most famous trust buster, a republican president. our monopoly power problem didn't come out of nowhere during the last administration. it is decisions by democratic and republican administrations over the last 40 years. it took both parties to get us into the situation, and it will take both parties to get us out of the situation. one good example of that, just yesterday senator kennedy and i introduced a bill to help newspapers and broadcasters negotiate on a leveled playing field with the monopolies that dictate how consumers get most of their news. i think it is three out of four consumers get their news off of facebook and google. we have strong support for this bill. senator mcconnell was on it last. year senator durbin, the

companion bill was representative cicilline and the representative in the house. again, bipartisan. we must find common ground on these issues and it no -- this is about saving capitalism and building a economy that works for all americans. it's about laws that throughout our history have rejuvenated capital history. the breakup of standard, trust the breakup of standard oil, to the breakup of at&t. what could we get out of? that we've got a innovative cellular phone industry. we've got a strong at&t that still employs a lot of people with their own former chairman saying that they were stronger company because of the breakup. we all want successful american companies, but if we want to see the rise of the next generation of great american

companies we need to invigorate our policy, i look forward to the witnesses testimony, i turn it over to senator lee. thank you. >> thanks so much madam chair. on a one i want to begin today by talking about the constitution. the utah constitution, that is. i thought you would be expecting another 1787 moment. instead i'm going to go to 1896. it's surprisingly insightful with regards to competition policy. article 12 suction 20 of the constitution says it is the policy of the state of utah that a free market system shall govern trade and commerce in this state to promote the dispersion of economic and political power, and the general welfare of all of the people. each contract combination of --

trade and commerce is prohibited, winter attempt to monopolize, conspire with any persons or person on trade or commerce. this is a riveting stuff. notice in utah we have tied free markets, the prohibition against monopolization, and the protection of competition itself. directly with the dispersion of economic and political power. today our competition problems in this country have truly become political problems. we see the trillion and million dollar monopolies are eager to impose their censorship called for by their political benefactor. it's worth noting that some of my colleagues want to punish

big tech not because it engages intimate censorship as it doesn't sensor enough, speech that's not a competition concern, it's extortion, but our competition problems go beyond big tech. i'm especially concerned about instances were free market is distorted by the government itself putting its finger on the scale typically winners and losers in the marketplace. weather for regulation or enforcement or otherwise. sadly, this too has become increasingly common. for example, many parents in this very moment wish very much that they could send their children back to school. in fact, many children who were suffering from record high rates of anxiety and depression they themselves which that they were back in school. but many state governments --

instead afrin protective policies for education. maybe if education -- parents and students would have more options and better education. speaking of the efforts of the pandemic, the last year has been devastating for many small businesses. this is due in no small part too onerous and prolonged lockdown's that shut down brick and mortar stores and drill consumers into the arms of monopolies like amazon. i'm glad that some of my colleagues across the aisle share my concern and i hope that we consider this risk will cheering on some of the same lockdowns. the same thing has happened in health care as well. just this past weekend, in the

midst of the worst health crisis in a century congress forced through a hyper partisan expansion of the affordable care act, a law that destroyed competition and has been disastrous for consumer choice and health insurance markets. the airline industry, repeated government bailouts and protective markets have insulated airlines from markets, and competitors, this has allowed them to avoid competing with new rivals meeting american fires continue to be subjected to higher prices and lower quality services. yet another example can be found in occupational licensing. something it will be more important than ever to addresses that americans struggle to find employment. so we will be restoring the immunity in this congress to

ensure that state licensing boards are not used as cover for professional cartels that protect market incumbents from competition by discouraging new entry. earlier this week i also reintroduced a bill called the one agency act. consolidating antitrust enforcement and the department of justice is essential to ensure its strengthening of the markets and avoiding efficiency, bureaucratic infighting of the past. this updated version of the legislation also removes the federal communications ability to undertake duplicative reviews of transactions in the regulatory jurisdiction. the fcc's application of the public interest standard has been yet another example of government distorting competition, as it has become a go to venue for rent seeking by competitors and special

interest groups. the cost imposed by fcc are ultimately passed on to consumers. consumers who have no say in the process. and those are not the only examples of businesses attempting to enlist the government in preventing competition. for example, a number of multi national media corporations are coming to congress for immunity to allow them to stage a group boycott against their advertising partners. despite failing to update their business model who account for the internet company and continuing to publish vice and fake news that many consumers simply don't want, these companies believe that they are entitled to engage in federally -- we also have amazon. a giant who is not only a giant in online shopping but also

phone services. it's attempting to have the federal defense give it a ten billion dollar contract that it belongs to a competitor. not only did amazon lose contact on the merits. but giving amazon the contract would only cement amazon's power and make it harder for new interests to compete. finally, several calls to form the antitrust law -- and instead address non economic issues like social justice and climate change or simply punish. it's important to support the schools as a matter of political popularity it's another thing to show budgets, they will have to choose between the food on their table or the roof over their head

because an unelected judge somewhere prefers shopping in local boutique to the efficiencies that make modern life affordable for the majority of their fellow americans. all this is to say we do agree. we have a competition policy program though. perhaps not in the same way that many had imagined. what we need now winter is not a sweeping transformation of our antitrust laws, this calls for two things. first agency leaders will put the resources in the will to vigorously enforce the laws that we have. second, congressional action to get the government out of the business of distorting. as i said before, we are at an inflection point in antitrust law and i am optimistic we can

find bipartisan consensus on a path forward to improve and strengthen our anti-trust regime. i'm grateful to senator klobuchar for opening this incredibly important conversation for her leadership and friendship in this area. we look forward to making progress and that endeavor and that the russian. thank you so. much >> thanks so much senator lee. we have senator ossoff. we are excited about that. we'll introduce others as they get here. i will introduce the witnesses today. our first witness is george. we are going in the opposite order because i guess we are disrupting things today. seen policy council where he focuses on antitrust policy issues. prior to his consumer reports he has had three decades of

federal government experience including nine years in a house judiciary committee, two years and a house energy committee, commerce committee, and 11 years at the justice department's -- ashley baker the director of public policy for the committee of justice. her area of focus include the supreme court, technology, and regulatory policy, and judicial nominations. she's an active member of the federal society. she serves as a member of the regulatory transparency projects. cyber and working group. she also engages in policy outreach and regulations related to these issues by writing op-eds, letters to congress, and regulatory contracts. our third -- prior to his position as director of the open markets institute he spent 15 years at the new america foundation

researching and writing about monopoly power. and before that he was executive editor of global business magazine. he has authored numerous articles and several books on the concentration of political and economic power including most recently liberty for all masters. the new american autocracy versus the will of the people. our fourth witness will be council at the law firm of fresh fields where he focuses on antitrust law. he represents clients related to u.s. merger control joint ventures and anti trust legislation. he recently served as a attorney for joshua right of the ftc. in addition he's adjunct faster and fellow at the global antitrust institute at the scalia law institute at george mason university where he he just courses on antitrust law

and economics. he's an active member of the aviation's -- our fifths who will be joining us remotely is -- on the massachusetts institute of technology where her research and teaching focuses on industrial organization, competition policy, and economics of organization. previously she served as deputy assistant attorney general in the antitrust division. the u.s. department of justice and director of the national bureau aren't industrial organization. her research includes antitrust law, economics, and for behavior, and a variety of transportation and energy markets as well as labor and determinants of executive pay. i want to thank our witnesses and all of the credentials that they bring with them before the hearing today and i look

forward to your testimony. please stand. i will swear un now. do you swear with the testimony the ticketed subcommittee will be the truth, the whole, truth nothing but the, truth so help you god? thank you. please be. seated i will recognize the witnesses for five minutes of testimony. each >> thank. you our antitrust laws are not working as they should. sensible clarifications are needed. competition helps the consumers to empower them with choice, go elsewhere for a better deal, offer better choices at more affordable prices and spring innovation. but there's a profound imbalance of power in the

marketplace. increasing concentration is leaving consumers with fewer choices and less leverage. consumer spending drives the economy that they are being denied a fair voice. this power imbalances starkly evident in the online marketplace where a handful of online digital platforms are calling the shots as gatekeepers. but it is happening throughout our economy. congress has amended the antitrust laws from time to time. it is time to invent them again. to correct off course interpretations and provide appropriate guidance. these measured reforms are far from all that's needed to ride the imbalance. but they are essential to it. two areas in need of a course correction are mergers and exclusionary conduct. merger enforcement has lost its poems. half a century ago, justice stewart complained that their rule for merger challenges was the government always winds. that time is long past. antitrust enforcers now face

skeptical courts, it instinctively view merger challenges as business interference. section seven of the clinton act embodies congress is intent that harmful concentration trends be arrested in their incipient's before the harm is too locked in. it prohibits mergers where the effect may be substantially the less in competition. but courts have raided the may right out, acquiring proof of immediate, quantifiable harm. that has led to examining mergers in isolation, with blinders as to what's on the horizon. right up to the brink of immediate harm, no margin for error or for a key player deciding to close shop. we've seen the riskiness of this shortsighted brinkmanship in the covid pandemic, her supply chains up suddenly gave out, exposing our overall reliance on two flute suppliers for critical needs. the prohibition extensive exclusionary conduct, they

dominic corporation sabotaging its competitors, cutting off access to critical supplies or customers or distribution has also been weakened. first, courts have acquired proof of a dangerous probability of success to create a monopoly. this leaves out corporations that clearly have enough market power to harm competition and are clearly harmony and. second, various theories have gained currency to explain away exclusionary conduct is never making a logical business sense. this erects a bull mark of theory against concrete empirical evidence of actual harm. like the marx brothers, they are asking, who are you going to believe? me for your own eyes? efficiencies claims are at the core of every merger proposal, but this puts the cart before the horse. efficiencies aren't even a factor into a merger is assessed as unlawfully harmful. and then, they cannot excuse

that harm or be traded off against it. they matter only if they show that there is no harm, that the merger actually increases competition. and they can't just benefit the corporations owned bottom line. a merger combines to workforces so you can cut costs by cutting redundant jobs. but those jobs were necessary before when the two corporations work or competing. so cutting them is a byproduct of reducing competition. as to the consumer welfare standard, we naturally view antitrust through a consumer oriented lens. but it's a wide angle lens. some theorists would constrict consumer welfare to short term, lower retail prices. even to use the corporations ability to cut costs as a proxy. but consumer welfare is much broader. it's an all encompassing look at all the ways consumers benefit from choice. short and long term. and it benefits from competition at all levels of the production and distribution

marketing chain, because that's what generates the choice for consumers. for the marketplace to be working for consumers, it has to be working for all who seek to reach them. senator klobuchar's bill makes both the merger enforcement and exclusionary conduct course corrections, while he wing to well-established anti trust principles and terminology. we believe it provides a solace basis for bipartisan discussion, which we hope will lead to a consensus for effective solutions, to ensure that our antitrust laws are effective guardians of competition in the 21st century marketplace. consumer reports stands ready to assist you. >> very good, thank you very much. miss baker. >> thank you for having me. so, i want to address a couple

of things. first, get to a bit of them mean underlying question that we're all trying to address, because i feel like those are sometimes very different things and i also want to talk about the courts -- as you all have brought that up a bit and i i actually accidentally by president -- somehow i printed out -- so there is no clear sign that maybe we should be talking about the courts. >> that would probably exceed your time to read it. you can put it on record. >> of course more important, that something we should be talking about two. coming from both sides of the aisle, we're trying to solve a very different problems. and from the left, maybe i'm not on the left, so maybe i'm not smart in using this to completely correct way. but all of it has to do with size and concentration and market power and how big is too

big. and there are wide concerns to, and i think these are legitimate concerns, there's a lot of concerns about speech, i'm not crazy about a lot of the things that people are doing either. there are concerns about privacy, there are concerns about patents, i think that's a really big one. but i wanted to kind of start off by saying, we need to beat a bit clearer about what we are trying to achieve here because if we aren't all not going for one proposal for different reasons, i just don't think that would turn out well. and i think, how big is too big? the question we should be asking is what problem are we trying to solve? so if you're lucky looking at something like -- murderous cases, i think it's really important, say, why are we doing this? is it the underlying legal system that we had wrong or is it something else? because really, if you look at the data, there is no evidence to support the agency of having any problems in any cases.

we've only lost four or five i think in the past decade. maybe they can be bringing more cases in, that's why the bill increases funding for agencies. i think that can certainly help a lot. coming back to the issue of the courts, i know it kind of came up earlier that the issue and the kind of tension between how did we get here with the consumer welfare standard? and that's something that i keep repeating to my colleagues on the right to understand the history of 18 and 1910 and why exactly it is that agency law came to be developed through common law, traditional in interpretation. you have to make a distinction between this type of judicial activism that we talked about, in kind of the pejorative sense and common law, judicial and embody the body of law. i don't think i'm not saying these are exclusive. -- kind of guard our judgment for

a long time. i think it's really important to look at defense before we tear that down. to get a couple of things that i think changes in anti trust law shouldn't do, i'm wary of anything that does undermine property rights. i would say that patents are actually one of the greatest anti monopoly devices that were created because it allows a single -- somebody out of left field completely to disrupt an entire industry and tear down a business by just having this property rights and new invention. i think we need to look at our patent system a little bit more closely. and i'm really wary of any legislative proposals are proposals in our courts that would undermine that. because i think that's a big part of the larger picture that is competition. because antitrust is going to a

larger -- i also think it's worth reiterating that the european union, their system is very different and here, we do not protect competitors, we protect that competitive process. and if you noticed, we have lots of problems with these companies in the united states. but they don't really have that many of them had all. and i think -- as senator lee said earlier, we need to preserve our welfare standard, i think there are ways that that is undermined. consumer welfare standard is not statutory, it's not overturned by saying you're going to overturn the consumer welfare standard, there are all these ways to do end run around this original purpose was. and that was to give the courts the system -- and i know i'm running at my time so i leave it. thank you for inviting me and thank you for all the work that you've done on this, it's been really great. thank you. >> thank you miss baker. mr. lin.

>> ranking member lee, members of the subcommittee, thank you for inviting me to speak with you on this a very important topic. i am very elaine and i direct the open markets institute. it's good to see you all again. americans today are fast reawakening to one of the essential truths of human society. that political economics is the art of governing, how people compete weight and exercise power over one another. competition itself is inevitable. what people can control is whether corporations and markets are structured to promote liberty and well-being of the individual. the ability of citizens to make wise decisions and the security and prosperity of the nation. for two centuries, americans were masters of engineering competition policy to achieve the sense. american citizens used anti monopoly laws to make themselves the most equal and

free people in the world. and the most prosperous, innovative and powerful. but for decades ago, americans radically altered how we think about and enforce competition policy. rather than aim to promote liberty, democracy and community. policy makers say we should focus on efficiency alone. the result, the result today is that americans face the gravest set of domestic threats to liberty and democracy since the ludicrous, perhaps since the civil war. today in america, monopolies are directly threatening the freedom of the press. monopolistic misinform insight and needlessly enrage citizens for a profit. monopolies tactics, manipulate and extort and steal other people's businesses. monopolistic destroy vital industrial capacities. last year, it was face masks, this year semi-conductors. monopolistic create dangerous dependencies on foreign sources of supply and dangerous exposure to the influence of

powerful foreign states. monopolies stripper americas community of wealth and opportunity. monopolistic use power in ways that needlessly endanger public health and needlessly pollute our air and water. monopolistic choke off entrepreneurship, innovation and growth, monopolies drive down the peoples wage while driving up the prices that the people must pay. none of this his new. i myself first warned of the dangers of supply chain concentration 18 years ago. i myself first learned of how the platform anápolis threatening the freedom of expression and speech and freedom of the press more than ten years ago. but, there is good news. the speed at which americans are waking into this crisis is bracing. there is only three years back that this subcommittee hosting a hearing on the wisdom of using anti trust mainly to promote efficiency. most who testified that dated night we faced any monopoly problem at all. today, the great majority of americans want action.

against today's unrestrained novelists. but you get, enforcers and legislature was a rising to the challenge. the justice department brought lawsuits against google and facebook and in the most democratic anti monopoly action in u.s. history, attorney general's from 49 states, puerto rico, bc and guam launched invents the geishas of google and facebook and many trying to file three additional lawsuits. then, there are the efforts to update strength and refine americas antitrust laws with senator klobuchar providing an excellent start. the people of the united states, we intend to keep our democracy. our task today is to begin to map out stage two. and this once in a century battle to restore people's control over the u.s. political economy. in my written testimony, a focus load photos who moved. first, admit the full magnitude

of the monopolistic threat to democracy. second, we learned the original purposes of competition policy, which are to protect democracy and individual liberty. third, we learn how to use nondiscrimination rules and bright line rules. fourth, reintegrate antitrust with trade, paton, corporate governance and national security and industrial policy. fifth, understand the political economic and intellectual opportunity that lies before us. this last point is especially important. how were opportunity today is not merely to solve the most pressing threats, it is to really learn how to dream. have an america that is far more democratic, liberal, just, community oriented, forward-looking and secure than any of us have dared imagine in a generation. that's the america that we can build, all of us, together

using smart competition policy. mucyou, here in this room havee power to make this future country. >> thank you very much mister ellen. i like that you said that this was a once-in-a-century battle, like the chairman of the committee came into mark the importance of this discussion, so thank you very much for your testimony. next we will please be joined by mr. rhythm a check. thank you. >> chairman klobuchar, ranking member, lee members of the committee, thanks for inviting me here today, i'm eight managers practitioner, and former enforcer. i'm grateful to the committee for holding this hearing and i am -- my views are my own and they don't represent the views of any client. i want to use my remarks to make three points.

first, the american economy is innovative and competitive. it is the envy of the world. it serves as consumers. well there should be evidence of -- economic experience in favor of dramatically reducing or rewriting the results. that evidence doesn't exist today. -- born out of research suggesting that u.s. markets have become more concentrated over the last several decades and as a result competition has declined. the implication is that the antitrust enforcement is to blame while economists across the political spectrum have not that the link between concentration and competition is tenuous at best the popular narrative about increasing concentration does not withstand scrutiny on its own terms. for, one it uses broad sector level categories to better concentration across groups of products as diverse as used cars and groceries. this does little to inform us

about the state of competition, thankfully competition in the marketplace of ideas is as robust as competition in our actual markets and our research, the leader studies have shed more light on what may be happening in our economy. the issues that will sector level competition is increasing at the national level it is actually decreasing at the local level. what that means is that national players are becoming more efficient and expanding into local markets, resulting in more rather than less competition. together these studies throw cold water on claims suggesting that increasing a petition is declining the come in the u.s. and that overhauling antitrust laws is necessary. we should be especially cautionary -- global counterparts, the united states has become the unequivocal global leader in innovation. we are the world innovators have taken root, here and laying the foundation to become

disrupters what the reasons for the successor no doubt complex, it is in part because the u.s. has developed a well defined, has developed well-defined antitrust laws that protect against competitive conduct while also allowing co-competitive conduct to flourish. -- has diverge from the more interventionist approaches in europe and elsewhere the more important divergence to recognize and welcome is americas clear leadership investment, innovation, and entrepreneurship. second, anti modern -- modern antitrust has become inherent throughout the adoption of the welfare standard and it's easy to think that there was a time when it employed -- that not only failed to create competition, bringing -- the consumer welfare standard rescued antitrust and grounded a in a more disciplined

intractable framework. in doing so it fosters the rule of law and helps to prevent arbitrary and politically motivated decisions. efforts to undermine the welfare standard would do far more harm than good. many of the calls to reform antitrust are premised on the belief that anti-trust enforcers are rarely able to -- into litigation victories. under the anti trust framework, but the reality is for. different over the last 20 years the doj and ftc have won over 80% of their challenges. this is a record any litigator would envy. it should be predicated on -- systematically losing cases under the current standard that they should win. third and finally, well the antitrust laws contribute positively today there are no doubt ways that they could be improved through and incremental changes. we should be sure that they carry of the mission of

promoting welfare. they are talented public servants. we should make sure that we can retain them and recruit the best lawyers and economists possible. and that we give them the tools necessary to do their jobs. no winters like and think that the agency should permit anti -- we should limit inefficiencies in the agency system. if we were to create a new antitrust agency today -- as a practitioner it is difficult to explain to businesses why divergent authorities and procedures are warranted. we should seriously consider proposals that illuminate that friction in the system. thank you for your time and i look forward to answering your questions. >> very good. thank you very much. i was starting to the chairman that you are in favor of adding resources as i look at the future bell. that is why i was out of my chair. with that, appearing remotely

is professor nancy rose, thank you for being here professor rose. >> thank you. can you hear me? >> yes we can. >> madam chair, ranking members, leaders of the subcommittee. thank you for line with the test testify today on antitrust reform. -- given massachusetts covid-19 travel restrictions. senator klobuchar mentioned that i had the privilege to serve for 28 months in the doj antitrust division. while i am very proud of the work together working during that service that experience provided firsthand confirmation of a conclusion also reached by an abundance of imperil research, analysis of antitrust enforcement in case, law and a concern that has been demonstrated by many of you here today as well as people across america. that is that we have a market

power problem. many factors contribute to that problem. but i believe that the most significant impediments to the fact of exercise of antitrust enforcement is needed to adequately halter or deter conduct. i want to describe for you why i think that conclusion is justified and out of evidence and the record. first i want to emphasize. we talked about free and fair markets. conduct that threatens competition threatens the cornerstone of our economy, our prosperity, and those markets. as someone who spent much of her career working in regulatory economics icy antitrust and effective antitrust enforcement as critical if you want to where the country problems and regulation that senator lee mentioned in his opening remarks. let me explain to you the compelling case that i think

that it makes for antitrust reform. the foundation of the conclusion that we have a market power problem and impediment to remedying the problem is the ability to effectively enforce our antitrust laws. the accommodation of market research and power and the city of antitrust enforcement as well as my personal experience drawn from antitrust lines. both point to the need for enforcement which i believe agencies cannot accomplish on their own. it is vital to increase the resources that they have available to restore some better balance between government and private parties who would harm competition. and it is critical to have effective leadership that recognizes the challenges and moves forward on it. those two on their own are not enough. they need not only more resources and inspire leaders they need you and your colleagues acting on bills.

in recent years considerable attention has been made to rising profit margins. most commonly measured at the geographic levels as you heard from the biggest witness. that has drawn a lot of necessary and frankly overdue public interest and debate to the question of -- it is a mistake to think that the evidence of a there is compelling empirical evidence of market power concerns over a broad range of well-defined margins that have been stymied by industrial organization economists from airlines to beautiful muscles to policy to health insurance and many many more. dozens, perhaps even hundreds of studies conclude that mergers fail to -- and to frequently harm consumers. there is rich literature on

economics that show how exclusionary behavior can -- nor is it [inaudible] including farmers, nurses, doctors, and workers to name just if you are harmed by anticompetitive consolidation or exclusionary conduct of firms to which they sell their services or products. the u.s. economy may be a model in many respects, but it is not as strong or vibrant or innovative as it could be if we did a better job of protecting competition rather than monopoly. the economic studies are far from the only source of evidence. the antitrust enforcement itself provides eight week a call for anyone dotting the significance of. it antitrust is at the heart of the deterrence bassist i'm. and the evidence is that the deterrence is no longer working as it should or as our country needs to. agencies are increasingly required to submit scarce resources, litigating

challenges to monopoly or even to a lot, billy you have got to bring those cases otherwise you have and monopoly problem. that means unresolved, hundreds of challenges that could take place where we have the resources and the case law to support them. the competition has been mentioned as an example and the problem is worse on the conduct side. so what i would say in conclusion is that we face clear and convincing evidence upon to competition and competitive markets, that the problem is in part a resource problem, but even more significantly, hostile case law to enforcement, and overreliance on settlements, perhaps because the state reading of anti traditional trust laws and i believe that economists have played a role in the quantification. i thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today and for

the protection of our vibrant competition and our economy but i hope you will act [inaudible] >> thank you very much. i'm going to go through the issues one by one. i guess i will go to maybe you mr. line first. when mr. reject was talking about the fact that there is not really concentration, he acknowledged that that was by sector but not locally. i just looked at the literature that mr. rose talked about and i think that there is a lot of concentration going on. i think people feel it, it's from everything from walking into the senate and here's some pretty conservative republicans talk about how their cattle ranchers are feeling right now, to hearing from regular people who are trying to buy things and find competitors, can you give me 30 seconds even outside of tech what you are seeing?

>> this is one of the most important things that are happening throughout the american society which is the concentration of power at the local level. one example is in the hospitals, health care, clinics, we have seen massive concentration in particular regions of baltimore, pittsburgh, cleveland, and wherever you see that kind of concentration prices will skyrocket and the delivery of services in many ways goes down. we see it small hospitals, rural areas have been especially, hit this is something affecting heartland communities all across the country, it's retail, it's agriculture, it is everywhere you look. there's not a single sector where you will see extreme concentration over the last 20 years. >> one of my favorite moments of this was john oliver did a segment and he went over all of the concentration examples from

cat food to online travel and he ended the segment by saying if it is enough to make you want to die good luck because now there are only three casket makers. he showed, them since then one has bought the other, so there are only two. next thing. we talked about the need for the agencies to be as sophisticated as the people that they are trying to regulate and challenge, which is a big task given that these are the biggest companies that the world has ever seen, and you don't not want to neglect other areas outside of tax because of the understandable focus. so just to see where people are philosophically, these suits brought by the trump administration, -- who senator lee and i work with extensively, they brought these suits at the end which i think was pointed out by senator lynn in the ftc suit with others interested of course in the

justice department suit against google. do you think it was a good idea to bring the suits? yes or no? miss baker? >> yes, depending -- overall, yes. i am in favor of enforcement. >> mr. lynn? >> yes. >> mr. -- >> i'm not going -- to fact intensive exercise. >> okay, that's fine. professor rose? >> yes. >> i think she said clearly in a professional way. i just say that because i think there is some widespread agreement across the country and across the aisle on the suits. and, so if you do that, as i said, you can take them on with mandates and up. and i really did appreciate, outside of your views on those lawsuits, mr. ruby track that you support funding these

agencies. and i don't know if you want to take this, mr. slow over, as having someone who worked extensively at agencies in the past. these agencies right now, the numbers are shadow of their former selves when you look even during the reagan administration. and yet, we're going to be asking them to take on these major cases that we tend to agree with as a country need to be taken, on exclusionary conduct. senator grassley and i have a bill that he's very devoted to to change the fee structure that hasn't been changed since -- past four major mergers. so that we can get some more funding to be able to better adequately take on these major companies, can you comment on that? >> sure. we think that additional resources are clearly needed. i've stated that in my testimony and i think the bill that you have with senator grassley is a good way to help get more of those resources to the enforcement agencies.

it's essentially a user fee on the biggest the majors that create the most work for the agencies. and the companies can clearly afford to pay. >> okay, very good. next thing. so we've got the funding for the agencies, and then we have exclusionary conduct and i've asked a lot about this because people say, okay, let's say we do something to make it easier to go after mergers and the future, but what are we doing about what's happening right now? we don't even have the data anymore that the ftc that actually caspar weinberger had started collecting decades ago, that's part of our bill to collect that data again. but people see this as how is this intractable? what can you do about conduct that's going on right now? like predatory pricing, where you try to drag your competition out of the business with extremely low prices. so you can raise them later, that's what predatory pricing is. it seems real good at the beginning, and then it's a monopoly that can just jack up the prices. exclusive dealing, where you force your customers to agree

not to deal with your competitors. or strategies to cripple your rivals, and i read again for mr. zuckerberg, exact words from his email in which he said, that these businesses are nascent, but the networks established a brands already meaningful and if they grow to a large scale, they can be very disruptive to have to us. and then he goes on, it is better to buy them compete. i guess i would go to your professor rose. exclusionary conduct, can -- i know you see it as a problem. but can we actually do something about it? >> i think we can, senator. and i believe that what we need, however, is a recalibration of what the antitrust laws intended when we passed them. we're seeing court decisions that are really nullifying that congressional intent and even basic understanding of exclusionary conduct and of business judgment. the examples you gave our

terrific. basically, i think it's impossible to have successfully brought predatory pricing or predatory peace -- and natural and be. if you believe in competitive markets, if you believe in small businesses, if you believe in that kind of entrance that some here have talked about, you want to give them a fighting chance and you don't want to allow incumbents to drive them out of the market before the even had a chance to compete. >> mr. revenue check has this argument that no hey, they've won 85% of their cases in court. so there must not be a problem. to me, it means that they are not bringing all the cases, one they don't have the resources and two, they know how the courts are going to rule. >> i think that's right. and i think the third factor is that you have -- when you've got and legal environment, additional environment that's a hostile -- you worry a lot that if you

bring a case, not only will you lose, the agencies can take a loss, that's not a problem. but you're worried that you create bad precedent, bad case law. and the shining example of that from recent years is the american express case. the doj, one at the district court level. went all the way up to the supreme court and we have a truly terrible supreme court decision that not only meant we couldn't enforce against those anti-steering prison visions in the credit card market. crippling competition in the credit card market. but it also now means that lower courts are using that to say that basically anything is fair game and a two sided market. and that's really devastating. >> all right i'm going to go back to you in the second round. i know you want to answer this and i also want to talk about mergers. but i thought i'd shift the mergers and how that could be helpful. i want to lead with exclusionary conduct because we can't pretend we don't have a monopoly product --

problem right now. and that is the bill that i just introduced with senator kennedy to give an even playing field for our journalists. and i know that you and i both agree, i've been on forums with you about the need for looking at consolidation in the media a divided route and the president free press is vital to our society in our democracy. you've been a journalist yourself, i'm the daughter of a journalist. and our free press right now is under threat and we saw this played out in such a big global way in australia, where we realized even accompanied the size of new score rose up and was trying to challenge this and literally, these tech companies threatened to just take their marbles and go home and leave an entire country with basically no search engine and losing their biggest platform. obviously, it didn't work as the world looked and it

regulators around the world started looking at this. but this is the philosophy of this bill that we have to have an even playing field and allow people to negotiate. can you comment on that? >> yeah, i think it's a very important bill. is very important that we even the playing field. i think it's also important for us to look ahead and actually be in june to plan how we reconstruct the entire marketplace for advertising in the united states. advertising, from the founding of this country, advertising has played a fundamental role in creating the environment which the free press can operate. it was advertising that allowed the publishers not to depend on the handouts. advertising was allowing publishers and journalists to not depend on philanthropy. advertising is what allows publishers and journalists to be free thinkers and say what they want. and the advertising that exists,

that there should be attached to publication, it should not be captured by and diverted by the intermediaries. that's what we are seeing today as we see intermediaries, gatekeepers, choke point corporations, exploiting their power to steal other people's money. and that is, and they're starving the free trade press in the process and they're starving our democracy. >> to the point, thank you. with that i turnover to senator lee. >> thank you. something that i've been adamant about but something that some seem to struggle to grasp is that the consumer welfare standard is in no way shape or form a get out of jail free card. not for big tech and not for any other monopolistic. and advocating for the consumer welfare standard is entirely consistent with a believe in the need for strong, aggressive,

anti trust enforcement. judge pork, perhaps the single most famous advocate of the consumer welfare standard, of course supported the break of at&t. the department of justice wanted antitrust case microsoft under their consumer welfare standard and the department of justice, having won that anti trust case a couple decades ago, brought another action last year under the trump administration. it's to google and facebook for monopolization under theories consistent with consumer welfare standard. sir, all start with you. do you agree that current law and precedent providing adequate tools to police the behavior of today's monopolies? >> yeah, absolutely.

i think that the consumer welfare standard and anti-trust framework have developed over the last 50 years. absolutely have the ability to identify in a competitive conduct when it exists. the consumer welfare standard is not some sort of a narrow framework that only gets had very specific harms. it is a way of taking the nebulous concept of protecting competition and putting it into action into a framework that is tractable and that courtside enforcers can apply. and it can absolutely reach a wide variety of conduct, whether it's based on price, quality, innovation. those are all features that are captured on the consumer welfare standard. >> thank you. that's helpful. miss baker, i want to turn to you next. speaking of the consumer welfare standard, there are companies like google and facebook and twitter that are always very quick to point out

how much innovation they give into society. how they've revolutionized the sharing of information and revolution that lies the way people communicate throughout the entire world. but, i wonder sometimes whether this is necessarily an unmitigated good. youtube algorithms are known to feed up seat content to unsuspecting innocent children. facebook, social media products fueling zahi and depression among teenagers and twitter has become a rancid cesspool of vitriol and just abuse. so, increasingly recently, as a special if, how should antitrust enforcers look at

markets where the product itself causes harm, causes consumer harm how, should we look at that? >> it depends a lot on what you are talking about. i think there's an anti trust, and some of the other things are describing might fall under a lot of different laws. but to get back to our consumer welfare standard, -- one thing i'd like to clarify is a misconception that consumer welfare standard is an entirely -- [inaudible]

[inaudible] [inaudible] >> in 2018, the ftc filed an antitrust complaint against two therapists, staff and companies for agreeing to fix therapist wages. although this sort of naked agreement between competitors, alleged in that complaint, often warrants prosecution, the ftc did not notify the problem of justice. did not notify the antitrust division at doj, in which of course, overseas to criminal enforcement of antitrust laws. instead, what happened was that the antitrust division learned about this matter only from the ftc's press release. and in december of last year,

the department of justice invite announced the indictment of the owner of one of the staffing companies. this looks to me like an incredible inefficiency that wastes taxpayer resources, delays redress for consumers and it rid sultana needless amount of counterproductive organizational structure in government. would you agree that this is just one more example of why it's absolutely essential that we consolidate antitrust enforcement under one single roof? >> i completely agree that there are many inefficiencies in our two agency system and you point out one of them. as a practitioner, it is frustrating, at times, to find -- the come out in front of those frictions and explain those systems to businesses and why you don't know which agency will be reviewing your action and why the agencies aren't

responding because they might not have decided which agency will review them. so i think there are ways to reduce the differences between the two agencies, the different procedures, the different areas of expertise and to illuminate some of those efficiencies, i think that is an important job or not i said in my opening, i don't think anyone will create a system today after we're starting from scratch with two agencies and forcing the anti trust laws, particularly where we've seen in recent years that they've actually had conflicting opinions on topics. in fact filing motions against each other. >> mr. lynn, in testimony before this subcommittee in 2017, you wrote i believe that america's anti monopoly laws are largely after the task, as they were originally framed by congress, i also agree that

antitrust enforcers should not have to make political decisions, or judge between different political outcomes. that is because congress has already made those political decisions when it originally framed and enacted those statutes. with that statement in mind, do you agree that congress should not change antitrust laws right now? >> with that statement in mind, i would say that the laws as originally written are sufficient in their intent for us to deal with the problems that face us. now why do we need new law? why wouldn't you'll actually help us? >> new laws set as senator klobuchar would help us clarify the original intent of congress after 40 years of ideological

muddying of the intent of the original intent of congress. the consumer welfare frame as well meaning as it might have been originally, it's sort of broke loose of the original intent of the law. it has created all kinds of problems throughout the judiciary. the law itself today is not as clear as it was. an additional semen from congress can help us to understand the return to the original purpose of the law. >> okay so that does that reflect something that has changed over the last four years or am i misreading your statement four years ago. >> senator, the people are going to use a law as we find. it and we are going to use our other powers to achieve what we need to achieve. we are going to save our democracy one way or another. if there is no new piece of law we will still win.

we will use the existing law in whatever way beacon use. it that is in what we see with the attorney general of united states. we have 49 attorney generals of the united states standing up to take on google and facebook. in terms of actually trying to concentrate olive authority within a single agency there we have proof about why that is dangerous. remember, the last time that we had a problem in this country with this degree of concentrated power was the decision of the people of the united states? it was to create separate agencies. to create competition among the enforcer so that if one enforcement agency is run by someone who does not know what's going on or is captured, or in some way controlled, then you have another agency to create rivalry. and then in fact they said that's not enough. we are going to establish this authority in every state of the union so that people over on the country can use this authority. the antitrust authority to keep themselves free.

>> those are 50 separate sovereigns, a different question from whether we want to have to heads of the same beast. >> i thought you liked him talking about original intent though. that is what i thought. next to go to chairman bourbon. thank you for joining us. >> i would not miss it. this is the first voyage of the subcommittee under the championship of amy klobuchar. we certainly know that senator klobuchar knows antitrust. in fact, she has written a book. it's called antitrust, taking on the monopoly power from the golden age to the gilded. age coming to a bookstore near. you i'm told it's just 624 pages long, it is just in time to become a runaway summer vacation beach read. i'm sure it will be a success. >> you may be surprised, there are cartoons. >> let me just tell, you 15 years ago i walked into the

room and sat in this, chair the sender had a subcommittee hearing on a topic that i had never heard of before. it was called the interchange fee. the swipe fee. i did not know what they were talking, about the retailers ended up at the table dislike, yours explain what was going on here. they said that these, fees swipe fees were being charged by visa, mastercard, and the other credit card companies to all the merchants and credit card companies that were using them for transactions. turns out they were mandated. visa and master card said this is what you will pay at each transaction at a restaurant or shop. you don't have any bargaining power whatsoever. if you don't want to pay, it don't use visa or mastercard, see how long you last. these were far in excess of any measure of, cost and far higher than they would have paid in a private market.

they're so dominant that the merchants market could not stay in business without using their cards. last year american retailers and merchants paid out a staggering 15.2 and a half billion in swipe fees imposed by visa and master. -- just in time for your little restaurant that somehow managed to survive to have your credit card company business a your went to pay us even more. all of those costs are ultimately borne by consumers in north america, and i have seen by and large the power of visa and master card in the process. they introduced a amendment, effectively known as the durban amendment which is famous or infamous depending on your portfolio but it took eight billion dollars out of sight sees a year, from wall street, and they did not forget. they're waiting for an opportunity to get even again. where is the policing authority to stop the stew optically from doing this to every merchant,

retailer in america. i don't see it. my question just into something even more basic. 20 years ago i believe i had lunch with judge poster in chicago, an interesting man. we talked about a number of things. he had been appointed to a case involving microsoft at the time. and he is a very smart man. he since retired from the bench. he's controversial in some circles. he said to me i find it very difficult to understand the complexity of the issues in this case. i can't imagine a jury of just ardennes area americans, even grasping what we are talking about in these cases. so let me ask, you when it comes to the ultimate arbiter, a, jury a court, are we talking about issues that are so complex in their nature that they are likely to be sewn out

of desperation because there's no way to go. mr. lynn. >> that is a excellent question. it gets at one of the points that i think is very important for us to understand about anti monopoly law, which is that structure is important, when you have a car beret shun that is extremely complicated, extremely far-reaching, that has engaged many businesses all at once, say google, becomes impossible for, anyone not even a juror, there's no government agency that could ever understand what is going on at google and you don't want to build a government that is big enough to understand what's going on at google. that's why traditionally in the united states we focus on bright line rules, and separations. if you are distributing information you don't develop information. if you are selling, bucks you know, you don't publish books. so this is the way to make

antitrust usable by everybody. to make it understandable by every juror in the united states as you get at the broad acts, and you cut things along the line so that everyone can understand what they do and with a should not do. >> let me ask you for your point of view. there is no doubt. anti trust is eight intensive exercise that requires amount of work. i think the judiciary is well placed, maybe they're not economics experts, but they are experts in interpreting documents. >> educate. me is there a special court or a special area of courts that enjoy this expertise. because i have had a hand at picking many federal judges and i don't know that any have stood up and said i am the person that you want to go. to i have the background. >> they are experts in

interpreting evidence. documents, witness testimony. that's what they're asked to do in these cases. they do it frankly better than some of the agencies do a times. the ftc has a internal court so you can compare the records. the agency has a certain when rate. then those cases are appealed to the federal court of appeals. and more, often the federal court of appeals overturned the ftc's internal decisions more often than the -- decisions. >> would you comment on this? >> i think that there are inherent complexities that challenge any courts to come to grips with. i think that is one of the advantages of having the trade commission as a separate organization with the

bipartisan leadership, and its own internal process sees so that some of these issues could come better to light, for education within the commission, and also education within the public. i think that they are inherently challenging cases. one of the challenges is to simplify the issues in a way that uses the economics that need to be used to give rigor to the analysis without obscuring the essential truth of what is going on. >> it's time for miss baker to respond. >> [inaudible] it makes sense that we can't say that this area of law is too complicated. when we first had the constitutional authority, there are other areas of law that are

complex. >> thank. you thanks very much mister chairman. thanks for joining us. before i turn to senator hawley, i have a comment from -- a public knowledge. and another submission from carl and trace mitchell from that choice. i ask unanimous consent to enter both of them into the record without objection, they are in the record. senator halle. >> thank you madam chair. thanks for being here. let me start with you. i want to ask about the scope of some of these companies, i'll start with one that i know that you have a little bit of personal history with. that is google. let me read you a summary of goals holdings. it owns android, pixel phones, is self driving, wink google fiber, internet phone tv service, google cloud, and she sweet witches google calendar

hangouts, sidewalk lobsters urban development company, around capital, deep mind which focuses on ai, -- which seeks to use hot-air balloons to expand access, jacquard which makes fabrics, solely -- and spotlight stories which makes films among other things. in other, words alphabet google owns a whole lot of stuff across a whole lot of industries. here is my question to you. is it a good idea to have one company exercising dominant influence in multiple industries at the same time. >> absolutely not. you left off a few from the list. there is absolutely no reason for instance why youtube needs to be connected to a mapping system.

there is no reason for chrome to be connected to cloud. previous generations of the united states would have said that this will not be connected. here is an example. this happened in 1913 when the wilson administration first came into power they found the at&t, great network of that age also controlled western union, so the white house called up at&t and said you will spin off western union, and they did. the reason was when there does not need to be, connection there should not be connection. it is a simple rule. >> what about companies like amazon? should they be able to operate a retail marketplace where you have third-party competitors selling their goods? and then amazon itself simultaneously occupy the marketplace and so their own goods competitively on its own platform, using potentially the data that it has gathered from

the other third parties that are supposedly using the appeal platform? is that something that you think as a pro competition policy? >> it's at that competition, pro monopoly policy. bush ever be competition between the provider of services and customer services. we know that the provider of service if they're integrated into the business will too good, it's one of the most fundamental problems in competition policy and traditionally we've always prohibited -- we can trace it back in u.s. federal law to banking policy in the 18 sixties. so there is nothing new here. what is new is that we have not applied these kinds of rose to these corporations today. >> it makes me wonder if we need to consider an update to the antitrust laws that makes clear that the sort of massive graham conglomerate as of holdings across these districts,

google, facebook, that you can be a provider of services or reseller of services. you can be a neutral platform where you sell third-party goods like amazon, or you can be in the business of selling those goods, but you cannot do all of that once. do you think that's advisable? >> that is necessary. that would take us back to where this country was for 200 years. it would restore the basic structure of power that existed when we were truly a democracy, when we were making ourselves a more perfect democracy. there's another point that i would like to make which is when you have a platform. when you have a provider of services, this is especially true in the era of digital economics, you have to ensure that the platform is entirely neutral and its provision of services. -- you shall post prices, and you

will deal with everyone in the order in which they come, and there will never be any discrimination with anyone because you as a monopolies have the power of government. we are sitting this power to you and therefore there will be rule of, law the way to a stab legit under the law of democracy is with anti -- laws. >> let me ask your question. i wonder why dominant tech market platforms, it doesn't have to be, tech we are seeing unprecedented consolidation, i think you pointed out some consolidation that we haven't seen since the gilded age. why should any dominant corporation be able to merge with any other entity? let's zero in on tech platforms. why should google or facebook be able to buy anything else given their dominant size right

now? do you think that a real like that would prevent any mergers by a currently dominant platform for instance, is something we should consider. >> our group has long supported -- engaging in any further acquisitions. actually i would amend that to say that any corporation that is in court being charged with anti democratic actions, that should be especially strongly applied to them. >> let me ask you about the abuse of dominant role as a presumption of the law that certain business practices are per se illegal when they are carried out by a dominant corporation. do you think that is something that we ought to consider? >> i think that it would be difficult to sort of draw a line between a super dominant sort of corporation at the national, level international, level and a dominant corporation at the local level. one of the things that we saw

was the rubber patent act which was designed to give people powers to deal with the local warehouse, are we did this with local railways, you don't have the discrimination by the short line, you don't want to have discrimination by the trump line. >> thank you. professor rose affected turn to you. can i ask you a little bit more of a technical question. what kind of thresholds which i like to see as optimal for horizontal merger enforcement? >> thank you senator. i haven't come up with a particular number but there is interesting work that is just out, that suggests that just as important as it might be to bring the level for highly concentrated markets down from 25 to 2500 to something closer to the 1800 or 2000 levels. it is even more important to look at the change in each i if

you want to look at the changing concentration credit by the merger. so i would think that one thing that the agencies might looked at as the are reviewing the horizontal merger guidelines as they do periodically is to perhaps but more emphasis on the changes of concentration even for markets that might not be as highly concentrated under current guidelines. >> very. good vertical mergers, under what's are comes chances do think that vertical mergers along with supply chain ought to be blocked? >> i think those are fact intensive exercises. but i think we have substantially under and force the low with respect to vertical mergers. that is an area where it is very challenging. at&t warner case i think demonstrated. that the judge had difficulty understanding arguments about

why the merger would be anticompetitive and the judges find it easier to understand analysis, pops economic analysis, i think in that case as a case and other murder cases perhaps the court was not willing to take the interested parties, all would be well post merger. definitely i think we need to do much more aggressive enforcement. >> thank you. >> we now turn to senator blumenthal. >> thank you very much senator klobuchar. really appreciate your leadership. most especially on the competition and antitrust format, which i am proud to cosponsor, and other measures in the subcommittee and full

committee. i am very concerned about barriers to private enforcement. i am a former antitrust enforcer as state and attorney general. i know very well the role of state attorney generals in enforcing their laws not just for their, own but also other consumers as well. i think both the varkey antitrust laws, the sherman act, -- empowered small businesses to seek recourses for abuse of monopoly power, but so often these harmed businesses and consumers face really herculean obstacles to getting their day in, act which is why i introduced -- which would reduce forced

arbitration. that's why i think the limitations to private enforcement in the indirect purchaser rule has to be reformed. it was established by the supreme court into decisions. -- megan delrahim urged congress to override the decisions which in her words work together to confuse antitrust doctrine, and to handcuff victims with no path for recovery while providing plaintiffs with unfair windfall. his speech actually echoed concerns raised by justice kavanaugh in the courts opinion, in apple be pepper. when he expressed skepticism about too rigid application of the indirect purchaser.

there are four second increase did for in these roles that i hope our subcommittee will examine, including the fair act. but i want to focus first on inter aber billet-y requirements. all of you know how in effect google and facebook have dug most ground there. very formidable castles trapping users from the network effect of their products and systems can have devastating effects on competition. my view is that we need inoperable movie and portable requirements to break down the roles -- was that they have established. last congress i introduced the access act which would require large tech companies like facebook and google to offer inter operable access for competition, and consumers.

i don't need to tell anybody on this panel, you are experts as to why this act could be very, very helpful to achieving, lower switching cost, and barrister competition. in short it would help consumers breakup with big tech. not necessarily break up big tech, but engender innovation and competition by allowing consumers to break up with these marriages that may inhibit competition. let me ask all of. you do you agree that -- and data requirements would help to foster start-ups and competitors that could compete on pro consumer terms with big tech. i would appreciate the support and access act in that regard. i will begin with whoever would

like to go first. >> we definitely do support interoperability. we think it is essential in a marketplace like tech platforms, where the dominance is so entrenched that really that's going to be the only opportunity in the near term for consumers to get a choice, is to go with some new upstart alternative that does not require them to give up all of their facebook friends or all the songs that they have collected or whatever it might be. those need to be in the control of the consumer. not the platform. we also think that it is important in whatever wider access is, given that focus be given on the consumer being aware of and in charge of what happens to their data and their information. >> thank you. >> so i would say that it

depends. this is potentially a very pro consumer option. first i think we need to separate what is portability rather than inoperable. itty the concerns are different. it comes on the implementation, have brought of a mandate it, is technology and security. i think that's a very big consideration as well. this is something that would have to be -- especially when it comes to portability because that can come with security risks. i think it's definitely worth exploring. the devils in the details sometimes. >> you endorse it in principle. you want to see the detail. >> i endorse exploring this. yes. >> senator, if i could weigh in. >> yes, sorry. >> i wanted to say i think that is extremely insightful

analysis of both the problems that we have with some of these tech platforms, and how we might approach a light touch regulation to improve the sector, i know you are aware of the success that we had with this approach, first with increasing competition and long distance service and increasing service and local -- with the interoperability of the systems, so i think antitrust isn't going to reach some of the problems that we have with some of these large technology platforms. competition will have a tough time if we cannot find a way to make entrance more viable. that type of approach, as it is being pursued in europe and the u.s. could be a powerful thing for competition. >> our organization surely

supports inter upper billy requirements, with the caveat, we have to understand that those alone will not solve the power problems. and that we have to be focused on integrating interoperability recurrence with discrimination rules and ensuring that we are getting the proper structure. nancy rose mentioned the at&t case. part of what was happening was the restructuring of at&t. so these things have to be pursued as a unit. >> that is a good point. i wasn't suggesting that the access act be the exclusive reform that we undertake but i take your point. thank you. >> some people do. thank you. >> says the analogy has been made to the portability of phone numbers, i think that was

a policy supported in the bush administration, and it has similar benefits. i think that these issues are equally in need of study. i think it's likely that these are much more complex, as others have said that the devil is in the details so to speak because of that level of complexity. >> i do not dispute that it is complex or could be made complex. but the principle is very simple, as all of you know it has worked as you say in telecommunication. i hope that we can continue to get the benefit of your insight, thank you will. n ha>> very good, thank you very much senator blumenthal, i also want to know, we've been joined by senator blackburn who has interest in this issue which i appreciate. and she's been online, you can't always see a everyone but i want to thank her for her participation. and i'm going to turn over to senator lee to ask a few more questions, we have a vote coming up. so he and i will close with some questions.

senator lee. >> thanks very much madam chairman. >> as i've said several times, social media giants, facebook and twitter appear increasingly to be frequently bias against conservatives and apparently have no reservations about taking them off their platforms or otherwise taking adverse action against them for things that they post. and i say this to someone who's been a pretty loyal, faithful customer and consumer of their services over the last 12 years or so. this didn't exist at all when i first started using social media platforms a dozen years ago. it was an effective, albeit new technology that just allowed people to share information as they saw fit. it didn't exist for quite some time. at first, it was subtle. i hope that it was just

misunderstanding that was happening but it's continued to grow to the point that it's unmistakable. i find it interesting that the censorship and the political bias became more brazen, as the companies grew. perhaps more importantly, as their market dominance became more complete. so, when a platform feels like in concrete its own users, it's one customers that way,, and raises some questions. when a platform acts like this, taking a very large sacrament of its user population and treats them that way, doesn't that tend to indicate that the platform doesn't think that it faces any serious competitive

threat? >> i'd say that i'm certainly sympathetic to these issues of bias and i think it is -- to the extent, it is because of a competition issue. the anti trust laws would be capable of tackling that. as if, if these issues are being raised because of anticompetitive practices, then there is nothing that would prevent the agencies plaintiffs from prosecuting them and kind of outlining and articulating how that is a competition problem. i suspect that these are broader societal issues and policy questions that i'm certainly not an expert and that are probably better to address these types of issues, but the extent of the competition, i have not heard an explanation for why the anti trust laws can get to it because if the he articulated in that concern. >> because typically, if we did have an industry in which there

were alternatives, and which there were actually competitions, sort of discriminating on the basis of political ideology, economic views or anything else that tends to divide large groups of people, you might have large migrations of people from one platform to another. miss baker, let's go to you next. one conservatives are deplatformed, were often told. look, if you don't like it, you can go up and build your own. for a long time, i found that our argument persuasive. i really don't like government intervention in anything. i'm actually more open to it in the field of antitrust deny many others but across the board, i'd rather have governments stay out for the most part. the argument works in some areas and in some ways, but if you don't like, it will build your own argument lost a lot of

steam recently. parlor tried and what happened? apple and google and amazon all teamed up to just kick parlor off the internet and out of the zone of being able to operate entirely. build your own sounds really nice in theory, but in this instance, i'm not sure it works and practice. do we have an injury problem? >> so i'd like to separate those events for that specific parlance incident because that was more of a contract dispute. overall, and i talk about this in my written comments. market entry is a bit different now, not that it's harder to enter, it's more that new market entrance tends to not replicate the same platform and the same product, but kind of -- as i described it here, enter

from the side. they have a new product that's the value the core asset of whatever they are competing with. so, no one is really building a new facebook because it's already been done. many people are trying to do that but that's not where the start of communities and the venture capital community is going. >> it did in the case of parlor. i mean they did in fact build it and a new social media network and they had an app and all within a matter of days. it had amazon refusing to continue to provide cloud services, does taking them out of operation altogether. it had both apple and google within, i don't know, hours of each other removing them from their app store. you're right, there doesn't seem to be a lot of entry into the marketplace. in this instance, there was a new entry and granted, parlor

was a much smaller platform and far for you were users than twitter and certainly for our fewer than facebook and instagram. nonetheless, once they got into this, they got kicked out. it's difficult to see that as a robust marketplace where new entrance can make a play, doesn't it? >> will to address your first problem. it's not exactly the same product either, it is geared toward a separate set of consumers. but from my understanding, the parlor case and it's pending litigation, i don't like to weigh in on things without knowing what's in all of the documents and that sort of thing. but it sounds like they dropped their antitrust claim and that was more of some sort of

contract dispute. how you would resolve that problem, i think it would be really dangerous to tell companies that they have to provide a service. so i understand that it's a problem, but i see a huge risk of overcorrecting there. >> sir, we are a lot of talk about increasing concentration within industries, that's not exactly the same thing as concentration in product markets, is? it can you explain the difference? >> sure. so, the initial studies that started this big debate at the sector level, so combining used cars and boats or fishing reels and groceries. products that i don't think anybody would consider substitutes and that is where the essence of competition comes between alternatives and substitutes. the more recent research, including research that just came out this year shows that the concentration at the product level in local markets

is decreasing. and that is much more informative if concentration to be taken as informative then thinking about secretary level competition. doctor rose mentioned, and this is how often the debate goes, which is we start off by tokyo will aggregate the and national level data and then people pick and choose more narrow markets to support a whole overhaul of the anti trust laws. dr. ross and i to fight a few that we commonly here, which is airlines, health care and others. and i would just point out that those are typically the ones that are the most heavily regulated by the government are the ones where proponents of reform point to has concentrated. >> born in captivity, rather than born in freedom. thank you madam chair. >> very good, thank you senator ali. my piece of this, i'm trying to orderly go through this as much as we can at a hearing but we started by talking about the concentration.

i asked some questions which i think are really important for a bill that is bipartisan that i have with senator grassley and funding the agency and there are some widespread interest in that from our witnesses. then we talked about the exclusionary conduct and how much that is an issue right now because you can change everything you want going forward, but if you don't look at some of the stuff that's already happened, just as they did with the at&t break up, you're not going to get very far. but i did want to talk about future and future mergers as we see a bunch of small businesses have closed down. we see the beginnings of mergers or food delivery, which would have cornered the market from one company and i know one of those mergers, but they backed down for a lot of pushback for many people. but i think we're going to see more and more of this. and i appreciated senator hawley's questions about when you have a company that is so

dominant, why are you just automatically oking purchases. like we saw, and he has this of mr. lynn. and one of the things i think would be helpful or some of the merger changes for the standards, i'm looking at you mister spillover. that we've put forward in our bill. in fact, shifting the burden to the company that is attempting to make the merger, and that wouldn't just be in tech. to create on them, after either really really big, as he's pointed out of the mergers really big, or if they are over 50% market share and they are trying to purchase a small company that's right in their wheel house. and, the standard that i've suggested is that you would have to shift it to the burden for those kinds of requests to the company to show that it does not produce an appreciable

risk of reducing competition. do you want to talk about that as we look at going forward? >> yes, thank you. so there's already a presumption in the law, the philadelphia national bank decision and it's too often lost sight of and i think one of the greatest rage over proposal that you've got is that you essentially revive the philadelphia national bank standard and you provide some flash on the bones and some guidance in particular situations. what does constitute enough concentration, enough power to raise concerns where that presumption ought to shift and it's a shifting presumption, it's not a conclusive presumption. the parties are still able, as they were in the philadelphia national bank decision to prove

that their merger was not going to harm competition. but i think it's an appropriate thing to have shift and i like the way you build that up. >> okay, very good. and one thing we didn't cover. mr. limaye mr. want to briefly out is just how monopoly power can disproportionately hurt small businesses owned by african americans, minorities, women, and i think part of it is kind of understandable. we have groups that are coming in and are starting a new business, they're gaining economic power. and makes it really hard for them to get in if there is just a monopoly that dominates, do you want to briefly talked about that? we've been joined by senator blackburn, so i'm going to turn it over to her to ask some questions. so mr. lynn? >> this is a fantastically important point. monopolization is -- has always been a direct threat to both racial and gender equity. in the case of racism, we see

monopolization results, as you said, i becomes very difficult for small businesses, whoever owns them, to sort of get into the market and to stay in the market. but we also see all these problems on the consumer side, which is like we see health deserts and we'll do the -- hold to the health deserts hurting most? it tends to be people often rural people, but very often people in minority communities. food deserts is the same thing. we just actually saw with usda, there is a very large sort of shift of money to make up to deal with black pharma who didn't receive funding from government support for many years. that was equal to that of their white neighbors. and that was in large part, often due to the power of monopoly corporations. so what we see is throughout

our society, you know, whether it's minority businesses or women owned businesses. monopolization that makes it much more difficult and often the effects themselves fall much more sort of firmly upon to minority communities and upon women. >> okay, very good. i'm going to turn it over to senator blackburn for her questions. i also would note that senator cotton has been joining us remotely which we appreciate. i'd like to know because we don't see everyone who's with us at this subcommittee. senator blackburn. >> thank you chairman. i'm going to stay right with you and kind of on the same topic, i think everybody is concerned about google and facebook and their control over the news. and one of the things that, as we prepared for this hearing, and i thank you all for being here with us. we went through and looked at

this issue. the market as a whole, it's not a right or a left issue. you, know you have huffington post that lost 50 reporters last month and then, bloomberg let 100 people go last month. but, what we are seeing is across all the news rooms and i think there are sage 16,000 news rooms in the country. and every one of these news rooms have experienced the loss of reporters, which is the loss of journalism, which is the loss of the insight of the people into issues. that is being replaced. you look at google's ad business and what you are seeing is that they are going for clicks and the clickbait type issue and this is something that does concern us.

when you look at the connection between what they push forward as news, and then of course, the connection to their at business. so, i want to ask you about that. when you look at this connection, along the lines of market dominance and the abuse of market dominance that, what is the direct harm to consumers when you connect the dots from the news agency through google and facebook that are not trying to be the dominant distributor of news back to the consumer and what they're able to hear? >> in terms of the consumer, as consumer, the harm's for you

wind up with less information, you end up with less oversight of our corporations, who end up with less oversight of consumer safety, you end up with fewer people sort of watching over the governance of the mainstream in your community. we've lost in this country, there's all kinds of different numbers, but we're talking about tens of thousands of journalists who were walking the streets of our communities. opening doors, looking into problems, tens of thousands of journalists are no longer out there and you mentioned the people at bloomberg and my friends at huffington post. so this is a true crisis. but we shall also understand that this is very much a crisis for citizens, consumers and citizens. the information that you're there getting, is being choked pointed through fewer and fewer outlets and i think we have to understand that the advertising. there's another side to this,

there is not simply the starving of journalism. it's the replacing of journalism with a system that is designed to provide people with misinformation, with propaganda. it's a system that is designed to manipulate people. google, and especially facebook, these are manipulation systems, manipulation machines. and, you, know google and facebook, they rent out their face -- machines to whoever happens to come along to manipulate are the people. and what's the result of having these manipulation machines, these babble machines in the middle of our society is the incitement, enraging, sort of itemization of the citizenry and so we have people who should be working together, instead of fighting with each other in the streets. >> and also, there is an invasion of privacy component for citizens also, correct?

>> that is absolutely right. these manipulation machines, what's a trade on, what they use is what they learn about you. i, mean they study every single move. at this point, third starting the movement of your highs, they're starting their voices, they're studying the movement of your hand on your phone, there -- and they gather all this information and they use it to better manipulate you. so it's this invasion of privacy that is in itself bad, but it is used to manipulate you in ways that harm you as a citizen and harm the larger public and harm our democracy. it's all one problem and the center at this is the fact that we've never applied antidiscrimination rules to google, facebook and amazon. >> and you mentioned the monopolistic conduct of google with its ad business.

where do you see that running afoul of the sherman antitrust act? >> well, there is a case in texas which is based and large part and monopolization of advertising and, so i think. we now have people who are acting on this disbelief. but in terms of what we see really, we've seen a do awfully, a capture of control over advertising. google and facebook together, online advertising. you're talking, it depends on who is numbers you're using, a 60, 70, 80% of online advertising, two key corporations, that's a monopoly problem by anybody standards. >> okay. i want it to come to you. facebook, should they -- today be required through government action to compensate reporters and journalists

further news reporting that they work very hard to produce and quite other ways can the ftc and the state find terrain in facebook? and the current lawsuits. how do those lawsuits signal to marks ochberg that his days of moving fast and breaking things are coming to an end? >> so i do think that's a big problem. i think that the journalists who create the news have a right to profit from it and it's one thing to provide a link to the source. it's another thing to appropriate the source and to market it as your own and to use it for your own profitability at the expense of publisher.

i hope that that is something that the anti trust laws can reach into and correct. >> thank you for that. and i have to tell you, sometimes i look at what you are talking about, where they appropriate this as their own. and it is almost the same thing that we deal with china every day. they steal our intellectual property, but do not compensate the innovators or the creators that have brought that forward. so thank you very much, madam chairman, thank you. >> thank you for your thoughtful comments, senator blackburn. i think we've come to an end to the hearing. and i'll just note, starting with what senator blackburn was talking about. evening the playing field for journalists, we have a bill that was just introduced, i hope that still considerate that we've had senator mcconnell was on in the past and is supportive of senator durbin, senator ryan paul is on

there and it is also a bill that senator kennedy and i really are devoted to getting done, given -- i wish we weren't there. i wish that we were doing something about monopolies, but this is going to allow our content providers to better negotiate with wet are clearly monopolies. then we have the bipartisan agreement about finding your agencies. by the way, we almost got the grassley proposal on that at the end of last year. on the budget, the bipartisan budget agreement. we just had some issues over at the house republicans. but i think we can overcome those and there was general agreement between both parties and the senate and doing that, so that's a big priority of mine going forward. we have the exclusionary conduct with all kinds of ideas on that. including from senator hawley and others. and that's a piece of the bill that i just introduced and we're going to look at breaking

down some of the pieces of the bill and working with senators on those. and then we have the merger standards, which i just discussed with mr. slower. i actually think collecting data would be helpful as well, at the ftc, as i, said they used to do that and then we maybe would have no disagreement on that and i think it would better help our regulators to focus their resources on where we need to do it so, that you know, we're not all for marijuana or something like that. that was maybe unnecessary dig, but some of the things that had happened in the past. at the same time, one of the points that i wanted to make today was, you know, those lawsuits against google and facebook, that massive effort was done during a republican administration and now we have a democratic administration that's carrying on the torch. that is how effective antitrust enforcement has been done in the past. because some of these cases, as

we know, or from at&t or microsoft. they're not just limited to one administration. so i want to thank all the career people that have been laid bring in these efforts and i thought this was a really good initial discussion. i was asked by some reporters, are you going to focus on one thing like tech? and i said it, although i discussed quite a bit, because this is a big problem and we're gonna go big to have a general discussion for the first hearing about will stop breaking it down by different industries. but all focused on trying to get things done. which we will go back to as i touched on at every single hearing. so i want to thank you all for joining us. every one of you made contributions to this discussion, which i truly appreciate. and i loved, maybe a land with -- the battle of the century. and it feels like every century, we take on these laws in a big way and this is our moment.

i want to thank our staff and all of the other staff that worked on. this is incredibly complex, but it also can be a lot of fun if you enjoy history and you enjoy complex matters. you found the place. so with that, we will leave the record open for one week and i want to thank everyone for joining us and look forward to seeing you again. the hearing is adjourned. good job everybody! [background noises] [background noises]

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a few months prior to the january 6th the u.s. capitol attack capital tour guide, robert poll, shared some of his favorite unconventional stories with the u.s. capital history society, he talks here but the late 19th century guide of honeymooners visiting the capital. the electric car that forced underground passages and a

violent episode on the capitals many highway system. he is the author of wicked capitol hill, eight unruly history of behaving badly. the historical society hosted this top and provided the video. >> we are honored to have each of you signed on to us today, for our lunch bites with stephen and, jane with a special guest, robert, he has worked for many, years he started out as a computer programmer but heat will come from that to become a full-time stay at home dad. now his son is in school, so he expanded his horizons to become a historian. he's written books about his. house as well as emancipation in the district of columbia. he has a collection of stories, he always wish he had time to tell when he does tours of the capital. one of the things that you might not know is that he c