Alaska is willing and able to increase our Nation's and our allies energy security.

A failure to have meaningful oil and gas programs, including in the 1002 area where the Administration is illegally disregarding the law, will reduce domestic investment at the worst possible time for our country and our global allies.

There is a common sense, straightforward solution here to getting communities off diesel power generation.

I am looking forward to finding further creative funding solutions with you.

I hope that you and your team will be able to explore ways in which CDS projects can be awarded faster.

Okay. So maybe you can work with us on some of this TA that we are looking for?

I want to discuss the issue of opportunity between the Forest Service and many of our tribes, specific to tribal co-management.

But I do want to impress upon you that right now the community leaders, the mayors of the Borough of the Kenai Peninsula, as well as within the Anchorage area, they are coming to me, not for more in appropriations, because they are not…

this is new for us. And what we are seeing, it is traveling like wildfire, and what you look at, as you are as on the coast, or flying above, you can visually see the movement there.

I thought that we were going to be a little more competitive, perhaps, in the Community Wildfire Defense Program Grant.

I have long said that I do not believe that we have to choose between a healthy forest and a healthy economy.

Thank you Mr. Chairman. Appreciate the opportunity to be back at work here on the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies;

I appreciate that. Again, we certainly, I am certainly hearing from the Native leaders about the need to prioritize Tribal participation within the conservation of the Cooperative Management.

What is the rationale between--with just enacted levels when it comes to MMIW across the country?

GLRI funds have been effectively deployed to protect safe clean drinking water supplies, clean up toxic sites, protect wetlands and shorelines, hold off invasive species from entering the Great Lakes, and safeguard aquatic resources.

Recently, Senator Murkowski joined Senators Sullivan, Whitehouse, and others in authoring a letter to the Department of the Interior.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Assistant Secretary, we have had a conversation in other committees as well, about the budget proposal to shift the Office of Subsistence Management, OSM, from Fish and Wildlife to BIA.

As you well know we have a public safety issue in the State of Alaska, some have described it as a crisis.