What bothers me is that the budget that was recently submitted by the Administration cuts the NOAA budget by 16 percent, cuts research in NOAA by 32 percent and even cuts the National Weather Service by 6 percent.

Can we just continue to absorb growing population in Phoenix and Los Angeles?

Are there differences in abilities to finance those two solutions?

Even in Maine we are not immune to the impacts of a fragile water supply due to drought conditions.

Well, as demand increases and supplies either stay constant or dwindle, that is going to be a logical outcome.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you to our expert witnesses who are joining us this morning, especially my constituent from Maine.

I would say we also need better data to make better policy, and I find that very concerning for all of the work that we are doing here.

the amount of fresh water remains constant.

I am not advocating higher prices for water, but it seems to me that is an inevitability as we go to different technologies.

If gasoline were $.20 a gallon we would all be driving Humvees or something.

resilience equals diversification, and I think desal is an important part, piece of that.

We do know, however, that reuse might fill as much as 50 percent of our future growth projections.

I would be interested, if you could supply this for the record, in a comparison between buying a filtration plant and protecting naturally.

what can we do in federal policy to help in the areas that you are working on, whether it is tax policy, incentives or regulation?

There is a big opportunity here and I wanted to ask you to consider having it be one of the 'bully pulpit sermons' of your tenure as Surgeon General to help catalyze that enormous potential to help Americans get the care that they want.

Senator Casey and I have introduced the Supporting Grandparent Raising Grandchildren Act.

I think, by and large, we do a terrible job of doing that.

We held a hearing in the Aging Committee, Senator Casey and I, and a clear message from that hearing was the need for kinship parents to have greater access to information about the resources that are available to assist them.