On cspan2. Next we hear from policy experts on the role of software in defense deptment systems and its use for innovation they also talk about the defense departments culture to enhance modernization and attract talent. This is held by the House Armed Services committee. The subcommittee will come to order. I ask unanimous consent that the chair be authorized to declare recess at any time. Without objection, ordered. Good morning, everyone, thank you for attending. We are here today to discuss one of the most critical enablers within the u. S. Arsenal, software. Software that the war fighter uses is krucial to our ability to conduct operations in the air, in the sea, on land, in spice and in cyberspace. Aircraft carriers will be able to leave you are pier, we expect that the systems and code that we rye rely on will work when needed. Despite this criticality we see a department that collectively struggles in procuring, operating, and prioritizing software. Congress do know when something is wrong and something is right or when something we see the reports. We read the studies repeatedly noting that the department struggles with software, findings remarkably consistent from the 1980s to today. We know some things are fundamentally amiss. My hope today is for the witnesses to not only describe the problem but contextulize where possible whats being done to date and what the largest barriers have been for addressing these issues in a truly meaningful manner. I cant think of a better set of witnesses in front of us today to help with that task than the three im abt to introduce. Ms. Ellen lord, former undersecretary for defense for acquisitions and sustainment. Dr. Richard murray, professor of co and Dynamic Systems at call tech and cochair of the 2019 Defense Innovation board of Software Acquisition and practices study. And dr. Dan pratt, senior fellow at the hudson institute. Thank you all for being with us today. I will now recognize the Ranking Member for his opening remarks. Institute. Thank you for being with us toy. Now recognize the Ranking Member for his opening remarks. Thank you, mr. Air. Looking forward to hearing from you. The department of defense and u. S. Government has been critical in the development of software and technology in this country as a representation of con valley. I remember that it was our mission to the moon that led to the acquisition of semiconductors. That is what spawned Silicon Valley. Rs, you never would have seen the development of Silicon Valley and the technology. The innovation is happening in my district and the private sector, we need to figure out how we continue and strengthen and private sector recognizing the dynamic nature of software, how quickly it changes, how we need that innovation to keep us the Strongest Military and country in the world. I am looking forward to your comments and your suggestions. Thank you, mr. Chairman. We will now start with the witnesses. Misses lord, you are recognized for five minutes. Thank you very much for chairing this hearing of the in an era of strategic Competition Among technologically advanced powers, software shaped the nature of deterrent and defined National Security advantage. The urgency to empower our defense and apparatus across th existing and emerging technology is critical to not only prefers our ■9freedoms but those of our partners and allies. Transformed our commercial sectors. In turn our everyday lives. Now, we must harness and apply to bolster u. S. Military superiority in the digital age. Given current opnot be hardier. Software development and support of our country support and infrastructure needs to meet the challenge of the moment. To fall short now would not just be a but a source of imminent risk to our ability to ility to quic and deliver capability to close the gap between information discovery and Mission Response is a defining differentiator and emerging global competition. Defense and intelligent agencies must develop, acquire, execute d maintain software to meet Current Mission needs while also having the agility to quickly respond to future threat environments. The statutory, regulatory and budgetary framework for these agencies are right for streamlining to build and maintain the Nations Software advantage. The department of defense, procurement process, is one of the greatest challenges and opportunities to Software Acquisition. Often software is purchased using the same approach that is traditionally employed for major hardware systems. Typically this entails setting rigid requirements, lengthy solicitation processes and ultimately coming years later, to adapt software that is often obsolete upon delivery. Although alternative pathways exist, they an acquisition professionals implement them. Funding professional training and development for acquisition professionals to ensure they have key skills for implementing the full spectrum of geacquisition approaches wil enable the best and most Innovative Technology to be quickly provided for our National Security workforce. Dod must operationalize policies and procedures to suppt agile Lifestyle Software and service delivery, human centered degn, and modern technology stats. Training the Acquisition Workforce is necessary but not sufficient to modernized development and deployment. Resourcing must be available to provide flexible anleadership must demand that all relevant procedures and processes employed. My submitted testimony goes into more details on these items. I would like to close by acknowledging three efforts producing actionable recommendations that might be useful to the one is the commission on planning, programming and execution. We just last week produced our final report. We talked about recommendations that could be employed. Many would he the software defe coalition that is led by jane lee is producing actionable recommendations for the that topic. Subcommittee. And finally, the Atlantic Council commission on Software Defined warfare on which i serve, is again producing chapter three, been there, said actionable recommendations. I urge the committee to follow that, we know what we need to up on these. Thank you. Thank you, ms. Lord. Do. We need to figure out how to are recognized for actually do it and get to it. Our 2019 report, i believe we are still the most important minutes. Mr. Luttrell and distinguished members. Thank you for inviting me to speak on the topic of software points. Development. From 2016 to 2021, i was a the first is that speed and member of the board and co chairealong to do software. Cycle time are the most important metrics for software. Being able to deploy than our adversaries means that we can provide more advanced this was established in 2018. And be more responsive to end our report was never done. Users. And gives us a tactical the key findings of our report advantage on the battlefield by allowing operation and response inside our adversaries. Second, software is by people and for people. Dod resource policies are not conducive to attracting and promoting digital towns. Talented developers and acquisition personnel are often put in jobs that do not allow them to make use of their talents. Particularly inthments may not recognize the importance. Today and dod, the people with the necessary skills exist but instead of taking advantage of the skills, we often put them in thomas and dod have established instructions that govern the development, procurement and sustainment of Defense Systems. Software development is fundamentally different. Software should be developed and continuously improved using much different cycle times and maintenance strategies. Software is never done and mostly managed treated differently than hardware. I took the opportunity to read reports on the implementation of some of the recommendations for the study we have papartner with. I was pleased to see that congress and dod have made progress in implementing many of our recommendations including establishing pathwayse for software and exploring new procreation categories. These are important steps and they should be continued and accelerated. In addition tothese imrtant actions focused on the acquisition process, dod implemented many actions on primary and secondary recommendations. Some of the most important providing guidance including reciprocity and continuous adls. As of april 2023, guidance for continuous adls has not been processed. Dod reports progress but appears they have let to establish. A welldefined Software Developer including Service Members will out dod wto retain to design, build software systems. Finally, an area that is completely different when we did the study is the role of Artificial Intelligence and military systems. The implications of ai will be profound across all areas of society. Th changing so rapidly its impossible to predict how ai is working progress. Ai is poised to revolutionize the way we right, test and deploy. Already riding code based on the speed development. In the future, it will be integral. These developments will democratize development and ways to do it drastically reduced time. At the same time, software is using for military systems is critical to fail so we must find ways to harness those. Dod must stay on top of these developments and take advantage of the current u. S. Being development. Congress working with dod plays an essential role in breaking us out of the cycle. Thank you for your attention and i look forward to the session. Thank you, dr. Murray. Dr. Pratt. Five minutes. Thank you for inviting me here to speak on such an important topic. Im here an individual capacity. I serve in diverse roles offering perspective on technology and threats. Broad technoeconomic shifts and the vibrant ecosystem. As you all know, software is ubiquitous. Powerful implications for economic productivity and government effectiveness for cybersecurity and the character of National Security. These Technology Goal changes are overlaid on the context of our time. Strategic consultation. In the crux of the problem for National Security is this. And a sustained competition and the longterm competition, ultimately depends on the ability for one side to adapt. Yearbyyear mitigating weaknesses and advantage. The kind of questions we ended up with are things like our weapons against a relentless pace of threats. Can we invent new ways of fighting that put the prc on the back foot. These are the issues that the department tackle if it wants to compete. Everyone of these issues now depends on software. Ev military units tactic. We need look no further than the battlefields of ukraine to find evidence that units which are more quickly see better outcomes. We face a choice. We can be victims of software, cursing its bugs and overruns. Or we can harness it for competitive advantage by leveraging american ingenuity, technology. That is our question. Can we create a Defense System il adaptation . My central message is this and it will echo those of my fellow witnesses here. The process of getting code fr a programmer to an operational system is critical. We blur the lines between what is development, building something. And what is operations that same thing. Making this quick and robust is a necessary for competition. They remain in the minority and they faced daily struggles against organizations and processes built for another i call your attention to two axonal items. As ■ where adls how the department decides software is safe to deploy and use. The second item, towns. Attacking■1 on the first topic will introduce an analogy. In many ways, making software resembles molding wet clay. Forming it into some finished piece. When an Engineering Team works with source code, they can quickly adjusted, make fixes. Once the code is compiled, fixed and brittle. The code only works on one particular type of processor. What we find is modern software so complex, you need to feed the results back to the Engineering Team. Unfortunately, our 312 process makes this quite difficult. On the second topic, technical talent come a software is a complex and technical subject matter. Details matter. We hear this quick big headline sometimes. One simple trick can solve dod software. One Software Factory to rule them all. Its all about agile. Those are useful things. But navigating that complexity requires judgment and organic technical talent on the part of the department. The needs leaders driven by mission. It doesnt need armies of coders. They can attract this talent if given the right tools using i6 things like appointments and giving these people autonomy to make a mission impact. Thank you. Thank you, dr. Patt. I will move it to questioning. Authority coming all three had on that. I hate to say it, it seems, you guys shouldnt e. Av you want to hang out. Yuck. Totally cool. Sit back down. The authority i dont it seems like its the improper medium for software innovation. Software is updated every half second of every second of every minute of every day. It moves so fluidly. For the past 40 years, the authority seems to be bogging the system down. Im asking three subject matter experts. Well start with you mr. Patt, or ms. Lord, we will start with you. Ladies first. What is the fixed . I dont want to report that we will never read. What is the fix to fix this problem . This is the way we lean in fris failing itself. The challenge is the need for speed. I believere are two things that we need to do. One, moved to continuous adls. Theres been a lot written and a lot discussed. Continuous atos are not yet implemented. This would be a very good thing todod leadership. Secondly, we are repeatedly across even programs, military services, agencies, not allowing reciprocal rights for ato. The same software is being reauthorized again and again. Those are the two key things that i think you should push on. Absolutely not looking at discrete, repetitive, approvals. Right now come in fact, there is only a requirement to approve 12 systems a year, which given the fact that most of our systems went on hardware, software and data is frightening. Murray. I completely agree. We think about in particular. We need to be able to stay, this Software Needs to be updated. The longer we wait by not giving them the code they need to do. How do we get to the industry, right . If a zero day comes out, some attack on my cell phone, there will be an update in the next day or two, right . Theyve already figured out, its going to satisfies our own. We need to find what that is. I think you should be asking on every program, what is the cycle time is going to the software. How much is that is the ato process. If that ato, more than a day, theres a problem, right . There needs to be a continuous ato where we automatically check, does a satisfied . This is important code. We need to be able to get out there kuquickly. Dr. Patt. I agree with those comments. The ato is about the risk of using the software. The schedule along with mission risk. If its buying body armor, you can separate these issues. Is safe to use this on a mission. Does this help support the mission. These lines get blurred. I will say that one of the places where you see progress in the department is where they try to put these risks together. If you look at, in the navy, there are Program Offices and Program Managers which both own the risk of use of the softwareo on the Operational Network and the development of software. When you move those things together, you tend to get these were mission focused outcomes. These are organizations which have been able to use continuous ato is. I would expect that same characteristic to carry us forward. As dr. Murray said, we often focus on adls. We forget the risk of not updating the software, of ihnot we become too focused on compance, checng the boxes of, you know, did we meet the boxes we said we did would . We forget the underlying problems. The most important thing is the cycle time that we keep coming back to. You can keep updating and mitigating problems. If i may have one quick followup on that, i think we need to differentiate in the department between Risk Management and risk elimination. We are never going to eliminate all risk. These tradeoffs are what take human ■ judgment calls. What dr. Patt is talking about. I think its very important for congress to recognize those individuals in the department who are leaning forward and demonstrating, embracing auorie would say who was, has d that admirably. Thank you, ms. Lord. For all the young men and e talking to you. You are the next generation that will keep this country ahead across the globe. I highly recommend you play this takeback because we are counting on you. Do you understand . Outstanding. Your recognized for five minutes. In my district, when you have a software challenge, they dont just go out and buy new software. In fact that the last thing they do. They have a mission and they ive heard that they just buy new software to check off the box that they have complied. This is innovating in the way that the private sector does. Could you comment on how we change that culture other than getting tim cook to run these things . I think it comes down to investing in the human capital. Ifindividuals are not trained to be smart buyers and we cannot attract contemporary coders and so forth, we cannot change that culture. Right now, we have a huge issue. This is mentioned in our final report with modernizing a lot of our business systems. We are pretty good at talking about from a War Technology point of view. We typically do not talk ab■cou innovating business systems. We need to digitize those systems and we have to attract individuals who want to work on contemporary systems. Right now, we havent hard time attracting a lot of Software Specialist in the department because we are working on 10, 20, 30yearold software. Frankly, theres not the knowledge as to what can be done. I suggest working with dau, training the professionals on what a digital environment really is. Thank you. I would say, i completely agree with you. We can say this offer is not doing what it needs to do so lets go specify and put a bunch of reire of software that what you do that and go by that. We need a platform. That platform is an enduring capability. We are going to be delivering apps to cell phones forever. We are going to be tracking satellites in space there software that going to do that. That platform is something that is going to get updated. We are not going to say, right down the requirements for that and then it is done. It needs to be something we say every year we of money that going to do that. We need to create a system in which we think of software as to get into that mindset, we seen in the commercial sector. We are just able to jump on all those things. We have to do that within the dod. I think there are spots that are doing that. Ms. Lord said we need to recognize those. I think that we see some of that starting in the Software Position pathway but its for things that are pure software. So much software is sitting on top of hardware and the hardware mindset dominates. We got to break out of that. That software also needs to be upgraded. Some of that software should stay there for a decade or more but much of that software, things that should really be updated on a i will give you the chance to answer it. If there is a company and they are awarded a second phase, a waiting for a year and a half to get the sbi. Is there way you could authorize the contracting officer to at least get a letter of intent to possibly that they are going to get the grant . The startups dont make it. Yeah come on this question, there are a variety of tools the government can use however there are also limits. A frequent limit that comes up, often you have to wait for funding to become available so that the government cant advan some of the things that they pbb has done could create additional flexibilities which could be delegated down. Which could allow flexibility, allowing the same year, flexing of priorities of being able to move some money that isnt rpos advancing, say, a phase award. Following up on that a little bit, i think its important to noteatnational aca running a study on recertification on the process for just this very reason. As dan mentioned, this report talked about how if we didnt have so many discrete budget line elements but had more capability elements, we could allow the peo owes to have more agility especially in the year of execution to move money towards emerging technologies and the smaller companies. Right now, unfortunately in my opinion the process as an afterthought for most peo owes and pms. Its a little bit trickier to use. Again educating the workforce is critical. Mr. Gates, you minutes. Reported that the tr three Software Delay forced the dod to combat code f35s. I dont know what it means to combat code something. Unds dan maybe we could draw on your expense and you can explain what combat coding is. Im not sure i totally know the definition and sounds like coding on the go. I will say is the perfect example of a program that looked to our major critical for our National Security. Frankly to a large degree has excluded the Small Companies where the predominance takes place. That is where capability is. Drama, we need to decompose this and make sure when we are awarding these large contracts, that we are reaching out to the companies who know how to do this codingand again, manage risks, dont eliminate risks and find a way to bring them in. Heres the challenge we have with a lot of these companies. They are dying to get the contract. They also to things to get these spee11s. And then they want to protect their source code to access it to kind of springboard off of it. ■d is the f35 one of these systems where the upgrades that are needed are now being executed through this combat coding system . I dont know whether or not the system is being used there but it certainly the case that it is a Large Program used from traditional process. You mean that as a critique . I agree. Again, some components is not something you should be changing every day. Other things are that we want to be agile about. How do we end those programs, not that we should break the crisis. But rather, we have a well defined way of putting software in there and doing continuous atos. ■ . What is the frequency on which we are going to upgrade . What they would love to say s to us is, you need to upgrade it frequently. Of course, we cant share our code with anyone else so they might be able to participate in the update. How i braked through that . A great question. I will answer little bit about it. I think that you have to think about where these Pieces Software come from. Will have to wake up keith martin with smelling salts. Not every update has to come operational context to this. Sometimes i think that in time, its hard to understand how important delivering Software Updates is. If you just look at the conflicts playing out, ukrainian radios only last about three weeks before some countermeasure comes along and you have to reprogram or change the form. We see the excalibur targeting system dropped from 70 effectiveness to 6 effectiveness over a matter of a few months. If we expect our major Weapon System programs to follow these processes or spend years planning a refresh, how you ever hope to adapt in competition . That what we are doing now. That right. This is the problem. Back. H of it is going to go there are two principles. When we talked a little bit about. The other principal you just brought vendor lock. I want to point out that an ato is another mechanism by which one some Companies Get a continuous ato and then they seek to use that to lock themselves and because it is so expensive. Companies can spend 1 million getting through an ato prs. Of p and these are known as the intervals. Congress put this in place. Ms. Lord oversaw a number of efforts. What most principals do is they say, the Program Manager in charge of the acquisition shall define modules and interfaces and make those interfaces available to qualified contractors, to the government. What this does is this allows other companies to come along, they see the data, they see the interface and they can make new software that works for that. The government can figure out how to test this and make sure that it works effectively in context. The principles exist. They are just poorly adopted. That because people are protecting their turf. I have further questions about ai but i see my time has expired. Thank you. You are recognized for five minutes. Thank you. Thanks for being here. I was at the pentagon for seven years. Here, we have done a ton of hearings. It just our cultural problem. Speeding up decisionmaking, particularly as it relates to tech. To the point where i feel like to use a pentagon term, we are admiring the problem. We love hearing about it. And actually, there is despeed up that strength ongoing from concept to fielding of technology of any kind. It has led me to believe even as someone who cares deeply about the pentagon and our National Security that it is not Anyone Program or anyone authority. Its really a culture. Culture cross administration, culture across leaders. Im not a burn it down kind of person saying the system doesnt work so we need to destroy it and start from zero. But separating yourself from ■7d the tech, if you could make, some of you have served inside the pentagon, if you could be one cultural change, what would that be . And i would say, aware of fact that the pentagon has a lot of rules and restrictions when they use taxpayer dollars. Have to adhere to. The responsibility of stewarding those dollars is different than a small startup in palo alto. Its never going to be the same thing. Comparing the two is apples to oranges. Speaking from culture as people who have been either in the inside or adjacent, what is the one thing you would change starting with ms. Lord . Will i would implement leadership to demonstrate that smart, Risk Management benefits the nation. Their four, i believe there are many more motivations and rewards that can be given to th civilians are in uniform who lean forward and take manage ri try to eliminate it. And they move at the speed. And i believe that leadership needs to speak up and make rewards and highlight those individuals who are doing the l falter and not to blame them, if you will, when everybody is looking 33for a when i have the chance to visit, people wear their mistakes as a badge of honor. I started the company, it didnt succeee important lesson i am on the third company. It was so strange to visit Silicon Valley and hear people talking about their failures. You would never ta about your failures. With all due respect, congress has a piece of this. I think is a on. Changing that cultures want to be hard. If i could be going for day, i would change the ways we think about the teams of people working on software. You see a lot of this turnover. People are not there for 10, 20, 30 years. They come in, they start out another company. How do we take advantage, put them in a position that is skipping a couple of levels and other things because theyre supertalented, they know what i think they will help change that culture. Why are we doing this way . I know how to do it that way. We have to change the culture. We are going to change the culture by saying change. We do ctthat by bringing people and who think of things differently. Fostering a culture of doers is really the key here which is encouraging the accountability manager for the outcomes they achieve. You only serve in a position for a few years, its very hard to have a sense of accountability or pride. The great thing about software as you can compress these delivery timelines and suddenly, you can start to celebrate this. Combined with the suggestion that dr. Murray just made of bringing people for short tours of duty, i think you can get a vibrancy in the perspective and talent to drive results. I yelled back. Thank you. Mr. Mccormick, your recognized for five minutes, sir. Thank you mr. Chair. And thank you to the witnesses for being here today. I love the variety of questions all over the map. Im going to go a little off. We have a couple doctors and technological fields. Fferent parts of your brain affect different parts of dy. Its designed for this part of your brain, this part for your egg, this part for your hearing. This is your decisionmaki, in ai since we can no longer shrink the size of these chips. One atomic structure of thinness per layer, which is fascinating to me that we can actually Design Software to go into hardware and fit in these capacities to do specific functions like we do in our brains. After all this technology and all the signs come out we went brain. This is for mike to technology eskridge. As we do this and we are software to match the hardware, ai accelerate that process. How does that affect cyber security, how do we unleash that potential as we design Software Going forward . Ill give it a start. As i said earlier, i think it is hard for us to predict the impact that ai is going to have. Its clear it is going to be huge and we have to figure out how to take advantage. Our adversaries are going to take advantage of that. We are in trouble. One of the things we have to do is start saying, we need to be using ai to design sowa we need to be using ai to attack software internal to what we are doing, right . Where is that happening now . We right code with ai. We are not going to be able to take advantage because that technology go soicbecause ai is one of those areas, the developers of the technology were legitimately surprised by what it could do. They didnt know it would be able to do these things. Its amazing to do that. He did what it designed it to do. I think its going to be huge. I think we ought to be asking, wherare the efforts that are happening . One of the things i also want you to consider, georgia tech has we also had 250,000 students from india just one year studying. We had a ton of kids from china studying. We have production over in taiwan, right . We have production overseas, our Technology Going back overseas. How do wefrom being used agains are trading this people and producing the chips overseas and a nation we are going to take over. Im concerned about the security measure. An important question. Complexity of our software and hardware end design is absolutely exploding. I will say that you can use this complexity as a tool. Can produce the hardware and you can set features of it later. You can defer some of that. You can build and forms of defense. At the same time, i dont think it is possible to prevent all vulnerabilities before hand. This is one of the reasons why being able to go back and drive updates, detect problems and drive updates is so important. We begin to see this now, for example, some of the navy Operational Networks automated anomaly detection. They are able to push a patch before any users see a problem. To the advantage of the u. S. Is how we stay ahead. Ms. Lord, i went to place the question back on you again. We always talk about securing our software. How do we protect our technologies from the bad guys . I think what we have to do is look at these from both a defensive and offensive point of view. Its absolutely critical that we have standards that are held to when we look at the system level, that we also understand the providence of all half where it . Xis software that we include. Right now, we dont always understand the Beneficial Ownership of some of the companies in our supply chain. Frankly, ai has done an incredible job just scraping publicly available information to really understand where items begin. The department of defense has begun to put some contracts in place to use that technology. Security standards are already to some degree in the acquisition policies. That means to be followed up mr thank you all for being here. I really appreciate your input and also your service and many various have to the country. Despite my desire to ask about that this morning. Im sure many of our audience would be curious, myself included. I want to followup on something specifically you said, ms. Lord. You started to say congress has a role in this discussion about culture and changing the risk, appetite, if you will. Could you talk a little bit more about that, any specific ideas you have . Absolutely. I think often, it is easy to look at what has gone wrong in dod. If you will. I think perhaps if thghul questions about what did you learn from this, how did it happen, how do we do things differently in the future, that line of discussion would be very useful. Also, i think asking questions about what is holding you back from taking more risks. I think there is an incredible fear of failure. If you could engage Senior Leadership in the building relative to discussions about that and ask u motivate and reward them to act more like a commercial sector where we do things quickly. We pull the patches in a day or so. I think that would be really useful. Setting up others to answer too. Not to overly formalize it but do you think you could ever make sense for it to be more public or broad assessment of which programs, which leaders are accepting risks in a more formal way. For years when i was in the building, we talked about Holding Hearings to showcase these types of individuals. I believe the reality is that scheduling does not allow you of thing. Things like tiktok they need to talk about and work on. Theres so much you can do just with recognition with letters, talking to the media, inviting people up to your office for an hour so. It doesnt cost much but will go a long way. It would cost a very long shadow. Thank you. I think congress does play a role in the way you asked the questions. If you do something, you are forcing us into a system on which we are checking on the boxes. You look at speed and cycle time of our main metrics. How quickly can you get something . Can we get a leaderboard going . This program, why is that they are doing better . Weve got the best cycle time. We make those things public . Heres how quickly these different programs can get things out into the field. Thank you. One of the most remarkable technological achievements is just how safe civil air travel is. Its remarkable how few fatalities came out of this. The reason it became so safe and so successf strong culture reef. If you step forward and you talk about the problem, its about learning. Its not a bad failure. This is the same principle we need to apply here as we figure out collectively how to do software right. Many of you have heard many of you have also heard about the air forces xymanagement system in the air force general processes. Both of those efforts are efforts which dig introspection about their early efforts. They said, you know its, we need to pivot. How to approach this, how we think about managing this effort and we need to pivot. Those are the kinds of people, the kinds of decisions and that blame free culture that we need to make this work. I appreciate that. With the 22nd i have left, recognizing that that has to start from the very very top. It has to be a principle of all the leadership. Thank you, i yield back. Mr. Khanna, closing statement. I want to thank the excellent witnesses and i appreciate your tiyou again. Shedding light and playing information, we learn more from our failures than we ever will our successes. In the military, we never talked about how well the operation went. We always talked about how horrible the next things were. Ive been sitting back herewe a risk adverse in the house of representatives. Ill keep that to myself since im on tv right now. My colleagues and i will definitely discuss that. Members will have five business days. This committee is now adjourned. Had a pregame. P [ inaudible ] it is 100 up to what you want to do. If you want to lead and innovate, whatever thatlooks like, no one is going to help you do it. We are counting on you to do it. Is that a fair statement . Go forth and do great things. If you want to be really good looking, become an atheist. More live coverage with President Biden talking about Community Investment at a boys and girls club in milwaukee and well have that live at 5 00 p. M. Eastern here on cspan. Earlier today house met to discuss a proposed rule to regulate payment apps and digital waltz. Watch the house financial subcommittee tonight at 9 00 eastern on cspan, cspan now, our free mobile video app or online at cspan. Org. Celebrating the 20th anniversary of our annual student cam documentary competition. This year cspan asked middle and High School Students across the country to look forward while considering the past. Highlighting anniversary, each participant was given the option to look 20 years in the future or 20 years into the past. In response, we received inspiring and thought provoking documentaries from more than 3,200 students across 42 through conducting in Depth Research and interviews with experts, students tackled subjects like social media. It already started replacing humans in certain jobs and eliminating entire fields of work. Challenges in climate. Our tapestry can no longer sustain the diversity it once held. Discussions about criminal justice and race. Bias and american criminal justice system. Were excited to share the top winners of student cam 2024. In the middle school divisn, the first prize goes to the student from isaac ram middle school in california, the documentary beyond just sci fi, a. I. Reshaping america tomorrow delves into the revolving world of Artificial Intelligence, the high school Eastern Division is awarded to the student from montgomery high school, the promise of langley park, the purple line, Climate Change andf american suburbs. The students from Troy Athens High School in troy, michigan, claim the firs with their production unseen heroes, the caregivers of america. In the high School Western division, brenden■u jaimes, emil and max rider from Palo Alto Senior High School in california earned first prize for threads of change which takes a critical look at the fashion industry and our top reward of 5,000 for a grand prize goes to nate coleman and rafa from connecticut. Their compelling documentary, innocence held hostage navigating past and future conflicts with iran deal with a timely subject and features interview with a former iranian hostage. Instead of saying if we leave, i was blindfolded and handcuffed and thrown in the back of a car and taken tot brif 3200 students that parts tated this year,s grand prizewinner of student camkf 202 oh, my god. Thank you. Thank you. This is a huge honor. Were so grateful for this opportunity. We thank you a lot. We extend our gratitude to the educators, parents, and participants who supported each of these young filmmaker. Congratulations to all our winners. Dont miss out. The top winning documentaries will be broadcast on cspan starting april 1. Plus, catch each of the 150 awardwinning student cam films online any time at studentcam. Org. Jo us in celebrating these civically engaged, inspiring young minds as they share their opinions on the issues that are important to them and affect our world. The house arod a bill that could lead a nationwide ban of the video sharing app tiktok if the china based owner doesnt sell its take, the vote was 36265 with mr. Crockt texas voting present. More than 150 milli americans use tiktok. The legislation goes to the senate where the Associated Press writes itsrospects are unclear. The lawmakers contend that they are beholden to the Chinese Government a could demand data of the consumers in the u. S. Any time it wants. The story stems from isate of Chinese Security laws that compel organizations to assist with intelligence gathering. Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries held a News Conference with reporters answering their ti including the tiktok bill. This is with 20 minutes. Mr. Jeffries good morning, everyone. House democrats will continue to work with president