California Congressman Mike Honda Discusses American Manufacturing

Estimated reading time: 17 minutes

Then going back to telecom and the ability of accessing information, like Mr. Khan’s concept, we still have to be clear on how youngsters can access that information. Because, like you said, it’s free, and he’s developed the curricula. It’s like when we said we wanted to wire every school, and we set up some monies to be available to schools so they could be wired. But what we didn’t do was offer the ability for them to connect to the Internet. So yes, you had a school that was wired, but it couldn’t access the Internet.

Matties: Isn’t that what plagues America, those kinds of gaps in our thinking in general?

Honda: It’s engaging people that know the stuff to help write the laws. That’s why I think Silicon Valley’s presence in Washington, D.C., is important to help policymakers and agencies and bureaucrats to understand how to think better. We had a bill called EIR, which sounds like environmental impact report, but it is Executive in Residence. This is where Michael Dell had a program that had senior scientists or administrators, each embedded in different parts of the government, come back to teach them how people think here in Silicon Valley. At the same time they’d also bring back how they think in Washington D.C. so that people here could become a little more astute at working with the government. I haven’t been able to move that bill, but it’s a bill that doesn’t cost anything because it’ll be at the cost of the companies who lend an executive to an agency for two years.

Matties: That should be easy to pass through, I would think.

Honda: Yes, although sometimes they’re intimidated by having someone come in. But we should welcome that because it helps us become more efficient in our delivery of services as a government.

Matties: I’m curious about what you think the government can do, specifically in this local area, to really help manufacturers improve their business. What in your mind would be that critical component?

Honda: There are a couple of things. Since 9/11, our State Department has really stiffened our ability to allow people from overseas to come in and visit, whether for schooling or just to exchange information, and that hasn’t changed a lot since then, but it should change more in the future. Immigration has become hardened because of 9/11. They use that as an excuse and we focus on the southern border when really the folks came over from the northern borders. So there are a lot of asinine things going on in government by politicians that affect manufacturing and business, and when folks around here understand that I think they will become more adamant, more engaged and more outraged. But Silicon Valley is very innovative so they’ve learned to get along without them. As a result, the research and development monies and the access to that have dropped because they’ve depended upon themselves. We’re not pushing for it. New York is the city that has the largest amount of R&D money, and it’s critical for a robust economy and for companies to become successful.

I think we need to better understand the relationship between policymakers and the impact we create, as well as the barriers we set up. Like sequestration; it was the dumbest thing that we’ve ever done and it created a big impact on the economy here. They slowed down the establishment of a U.S. Patent Trademark Office. I wrote the criteria by which the Department of Commerce will choose where three PTOs will be established. I got that wording through the appropriation bill and I sold the Department of Commerce to use the criteria that I wrote, because the criteria I wrote was to describe this place. So this region became one of the places where they said they wished to place a USPTO. Then the struggle to have it placed in a certain city became apparent and necessary, but what was more necessary was to get them to say it was in this area. Well, once sequestration happened the OMB said there’s not really any money in the budget that we can sequester. It’s all money that comes in through fees, and the USPTO is basically run by fees so they stopped that. We then had to learn to look and anticipate what would happen and build firewalls around things that we cared about so that they wouldn’t be impacted by federal legislation.

Matties: Congressman, thank you so much for your time today. Are there any closing thoughts that you want to share with the electronics industry?Page 6 of 7

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