Lisa Murkowski

Chairwoman Murkowski and I put together a bipartisan energy bill last year that made needed investments in our energy infrastructure and our workforce and doubled the amount of funding to protect us against cyberattacks and improved the…

I look forward to working with him and his Administration, as well as members of the Senate, to develop a broad infrastructure package.

Senator Murkowski's office and her staff got everybody back onto the field, playing as a team.

I certainly hope that package will include provisions that streamline the permitting process for all energy projects.

I think it is a great day to be at work.

It's not the pipelines that are dirty, it's the politics.

I think that speaks a lot on your commitment to Indian Country and it goes to show that what you said about focusing on the challenges in Indian Country during your nomination process was not just rhetoric, but you meant it.

This relationship is far too important to not understand and I have been saying that we need to make sure all nominees and incoming staff with the new administration must understand it.

This commonsense legislation will lay the groundwork for tribes to address sexual violence in their communities in a meaningful way.

I strongly urge you, Secretary Zinke, to continue the conference.

What does it mean for the Federal Government to uphold its trust responsibility to tribes and have a true government-to-government relationship?

It means meaningful consultation and true relationships in decisionmaking.

It does need to be a whole of agency approach.

Is this something that you will commit to me and to our Alaska Native villages, not just the Alaska Native villages, but we have other communities as well that are in jeopardy?

When the Obama Administration announced its climate resilience grants last year, they thought ah ha, this is exactly where we can go and they made application through the Administration.

Let me ask you then, because I agree with everything that you have said.

Even more recent was Kivalina's request. They submitted their application for major disaster declaration on January 15, 2017.

The Village of Nutok on December 24 applied for a presidential declaration of major disaster.

Both of these communities have recently applied for major disaster declarations due to severe storms, flooding.

We are seeing communities threatened by storms, flooding, coastal erosion, the thaw of our permafrost.

We kind of do it all.

Would you be in a position to help us divine what we could do to make it more efficient, to make it a more simplified process?

We look at this as one way to gain flexibility and it has not been raised in this discussion yet this morning.

This is a situation that is not sustainable. So the focus is on what we can do to provide some level of stability.

Before the ACA, the average cost for an individual for their plan was $251 a month and now with implementation of the ACA, and the fact that we do not have competition and that we are a high cost State, it is $800 a month for an individual.