Gary Palmer

How much do you spend annually on your transportation programs? It is more than $505 million, isn't it?

What portion of overall transportation funding comes from the FAST Act programs?

24 percent of the families are going without food for at least 1 day because they are having to choose between buying food or paying their household energy costs.

You are buying gas from Russia, which is at best an adversary, at worst an enemy.

We are not preparing for the climate change that is going to occur, and we are going to pay an enormous price.

The climate is changing. The geologic record shows the climate is changing.

Are you talking about changes to the current contract, or to future contracts?

The only reason objections are raised now is it is purely political.

I think if--particularly if it is an independent audit, a reputable auditor, that should be sufficient to show that this is a substantial benefit to the taxpayers.

I would like to get that information, if possible.

Would you agree that that is a positive for the taxpayers?

I think, frankly, we should accept it.

I would like to see the Corps prioritize these projects.

One example of failure to mitigate, and I do not want to be disparaging toward the Corps of Engineering, but they studied building a diversion canal from the Comite River over to the Lilly Bayou in Louisiana for 30 years and never put a…

If you do not properly define what is causing the change though, it is a fairly simple engineering principle if you get the definition wrong, the solution probably is not going to work.

I take exception to part of it, in that at the end of your point here of hardened landscape, that some of the big problems that we are facing with flooding is development, the hardening of the landscape, land use, the failure to use…

And that is the point that I think concerns me about the whole debate around climate change is we get so wrapped up in CO2 that we miss the other things that are actually happening that we are going to have to deal with.

I think obviously the climate is changing.

We owe the taxpayer full transparency on how their taxpayer dollars are being spent and why.

Secretary Bunch, I know these issues predate your appointment. That said, we look forward to working to improve transparency and communication.

We owe the taxpayer full transparency regarding how their dollars are being spent, and why.

I don't know about my colleague from North Carolina, but I can't understand why 3 years after a disaster we're still sitting on over $200 million when there are people in desperate need for it.

This is something that really bothers me, is that we fund these projects, the money doesn't get spent, another storm hits, we appropriate more money, and we don't know yet what's been done to mitigate and provide relief from the previous…

In Alabama, the debris removal cost was being handled through the Corps of Engineers. They were contracting it out to look like a single-bid contractor.

But when you're talking about a small county and $15 million, it's not only a massive savings for the Federal Government...