Are you on time, and are you under-budget?
our responsibility in oversight is to try to protect the taxpayer dollars.
I want to make sure that all of the effort that surrounds a competition of such a major effort does not interfere with whatever we agree upo...
So that might be early next year that you could say to Senator Feinstein and me and what the schedule is and what the cost objective is?
I want to pick up on what Senator Feinstein said about cost overruns in big projects.
a United States Senator cannot, and I don't think should, try to manage anything of that complexity.
we're $363 million above last year, a lot of money, based upon the President's recommendation.
I'd like to talk about the two big projects, the uranium project at Oak Ridge and the New Mexico project on plutonium.
The plan to make sure that doesn't happen is the way we've structured the competition.
it seems to me that there ought to be a single person accountable to Senator Feinstein and to me for an on-time, on-budget project and that ...
It is serious business. I mean, we're talking about billions of dollars here, and we just don't have billions of dollars.
Well, there's a competition going on for management of the Y12 project.
The contractor was arguing that the longer we delayed UPF, the more money we wasted.
I want to talk about the plutonium facility and how you're going to deal with that.
isn't the idea that the research and development (R&D) project is ready to be demonstrated for 2 years.
We need $372 billion more for nuclear weapons modernization than your budget recommends.
So manufacturing 10 or 20 and then otherwise processing an additional number of pits.
Well, that's very important and another part, Madam Chairman, of making good use of the taxpayer dollars.
