It ain't a partnership if one side has to give up everything, and the other side says, this is what we're going to do, and we're not going to give you any money to do it.

One way to improve readiness is to repair our aircraft -- I almost said on the fly-- on the ground without waiting for the manufacturer to send a part.

Budgets represent priorities, and it's fascinating to me that if you add together the cuts for service operations, forest and rangeland research, and state, private and tribal forestry, that pretty much exactly equals the proposed billion…

It is a shame that it took nearly four months to pass this bill, and even more of an embarrassment that this bill passed on a partisan vote after several attempts at good faith bipartisan negotiations to put in place standards of conduct…

The United States Senate just passed a funding bill for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) without any meaningful reforms to the conduct of either.

There is no such thing as mandatory spending except in areas where there is a legal obligation to expend the money.

What puzzles me is the budget that has been submitted only requests one. I don't really understand that.

The idea of building Naval Ships in a foreign shipyard I just don't understand.

And yet, this is, I believe, an existential struggle for the future of democracy where we had an aggressive country invade a neighboring country without any justification whatsoever.

Workforce training helps Americans gain the skills they need to obtain high-paying jobs and pursue new career paths.

If there has been such, I would certainly like to see it. You probably knew I was going to bring this chart. This is FTEs in the National Park Service going back 10 or 15 years. Here's where we are now. We were understaffed back then.

I understand there's always room for rightsizing and analysis of staffing and those kinds of things, but this is not a gotcha question. I'm puzzled why the administration would cut by one third the funding of one of the most important…

They have stepped up. But I think the American people should understand that we have stepped back.

The challenges here in Houlton — the closure of the birthing center, the reduction in workforce at a critical moment, and the refusal to engage in a fair contract that supports nurses and safe patient-nurse ratios — is indicative of some…

Let's talk about the National Park Service. You and I talked about this before. [The] National Park Service budget is cut by one third. About $1 billion, which is one day of the Iran war just to put it in context. I don't understand why.

One of the factors of this budget that has not gotten any publicity is there is zero funding for Ukraine.

Unfortunately, in this case, at least two out-of-state circulators failed to follow Maine law, and that is why their petitions have been invalidated.

Citizen initiatives are direct democracy. Just as we take voting security seriously, we take petition integrity seriously.