City Council Agenda and Packet 2021 04 13 SP

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• Amtrak: This bill provides additional relief to Amtrak to keep rail service running across the nation, to rehire 1,230 workers who have been involuntarily furloughed as a result of COVID, and to restore full long-distance service to remote communities that rely on Amtrak as a link to economic centers. • Airline Jobs: Aviation drives 5 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) and supports over 10 million U.S. jobs. U.S. airline passenger volumes are at 42 percent compared to pre -pandemic levels. Extension of the airline payroll support program will help airlines and contractors avert mass layoffs and furloughs due to the unprecedented drop in business. Moreover, many of these jobs require intricate educational prerequisites, training requirements, and certifications, which if lost, would take years if not decades to build back. This relief will position the U.S. airline industry to capture the return of air travel demand. • Airports: Airports have been especially hard hit by the pandemic, and without billions in additional aid will be forced to cut the jobs of thousands of employees, reduce or discontinue operations, and be unable to make payments on capital projects. The workforce retention requirements associated with federal relief protect workers at commercial airports across the United States. Airport relief is also designed to help small airport concessionaires, many of which are disadvantage business owners. • Aviation Manufacturing Workforce: The U.S. aerospace industry represents nearly represents 2% of total U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and provides America's leading export by value. However, the drop off in commercial air travel has caused a drop off in orders for new planes which in turn has disrupted the entire aviation manufacturing supply chain. Over 100,000 aerospace manufacturing jobs have been lost and more jobs are at risk. This program is the first federal relief designed to protect these highly -skilled workers, the bedrock of American innovation and global leadership in advanced technology • Research Relief: Researchers whose work was interrupted by COVID-19 are running out of funds to complete their research and there has been no funding to the National Science Foundation ("NSF") to fill that gap. Without this research relief, the NSF would have to choose between supplementing existing grantees to allow them to finish their research and funding new research, which will result in either not reaping the benefits of taxpayer's investment into existing grants or creating a research backlog that further reduces the agency's ability to fund highly meritorious research. • Manufacturing: In the CARES Act, the Manufacturing USA program was given $10 million to respond to COVID-19. That funding went to, among other things, rapid research on the efficacy of mask sterilization techniques, developing the next generation of face masks, and helping the workforce reskill to meet the demand for advanced manufacturing workers. The Manufacturing USA program has $150 million in additional COVID-19 related projects that can be rapidly awarded to aid in pandemic response and recovery. • Consumer Product Safety. The pandemic has exposed weaknesses in the nation's ability to detect and deter unsafe consumer products entering the United States, ranging from a lack of port inspectors to insufficient ability to monitor increases in online sales. 14