I wish to thank Senator Whitehouse for his leadership. We are now 30 minutes behind, so I would take up to 30 minutes, and then I will be followed by Senator Franken. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection.

Your budget request is for $8.1 billion in discretionary funding. That is a cut of $364 million, as you know, or 4.5 percent from your current year appropriation.

I want to particularly register my concerns with the proposed cuts to FEMA grants and to the Coast Guard's acquisition budget.

I am also wary of the proposed transfer of the funding and responsibility for the Emergency Food and Shelter Program from FEMA to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

I am disappointed that this budget does propose a reduction in these programs.

I think that a mandate of this sort is very unwise. I have made this very clear.

I hope, of course, that an individual will soon be nominated to be the director of ICE.

The FCC Process Reform Act is bipartisan legislation that passed the House on March 11 of this year and would bring needed reforms to the commission's processes.

What we have here is a budget proposal that, if ever enacted, would result in more drugs on our streets, more illegal border incursions.

If you just enforce the law as it is written you are protecting the community.

Either this Administration does not see homeland security and law enforcement as important or it is trying to game Congress.

We all know a political election-year budget proposal when we see one, and I am afraid that is what we have here today.

the law is mandatory, you agree, nondiscretionary, mandatory, shall.

there is no one more committed to enforce the law than Henry's constituents.

I agree that you have to have available 34,000 beds under this law.

I commend you also for being a man who says, 'I take responsibility.' That is rare before this Committee.

The enemy in the drug wars never stops. They will find alternate sources, when we plug one hole, they find another one.

We need the icebreakers, because I can send our conventional Coast Guard cutters up there during the summertime...