Richard Shelby

We are also moving to another stage, past the Hubble, because of what we found in the use of having the Hubble.

I asked him if he would oppose a statutory process to allow a firm working with the Council to avoid the designation before the designation was made final.

I urge you to continue that advocacy in international negotiations to preserve our regulators' authority.

This new layer of regulation does not come without a cost to our economy.

I believe that FSOC has a heightened duty to be as transparent and judicious as possible.

The Council has the authority to designate a nonbank institution as 'systemically important' and subject it to enhanced prudential standards and regulation by the Federal Reserve.

If you are too big to fail and you are too big to regulate, maybe you are too big to exist.

I think we should make changes. What I am not interested in making changes is groups of people coming in saying, 'Get them, not us. We are not them.'

If you allow people with a balance sheet of 250, that is a risk exposure.

I do not think that regional banks are in that kind of business, but they do have a risk exposure.

I believe that 5 years is long enough to know if an arbitrary threshold is appropriate and whether or not it should be changed.

We want banks that are healthy, that are strong, capitalized, well regulated, well managed, because without that, the economy... is all tied into our economy.

Even Senator Menendez referred to that. Maybe we can work together. I hope so.

I believe what this argument fails to take into account is that the law that established this regulatory framework is very prescriptive on how the regulators can tailor their regulations.

Please estimate when the investigation will be complete and when findings and recommendations may be released.

How is the ATF working cooperatively with you, with the FBI, on this?

One last question to the FBI director, how is the FBI responding to the Army's separation from the Hazardous Devices School?

What is TEDAC's operational and construction status at this point?

And you abandoned it this week, did you not?

Where are we exactly on that, as far as staffing the program?

I'm going to shift to another area, to Fort Rucker, Alabama.

I was pleased to see this year that the President's budget request--$8.1 billion for the Missile Defense Agency, which is an 8-percent increase over last year's budget request.

It's essential for our future security, is it not?

That's my understanding. It's also my understanding that these troops have not been called up for deployment yet.

You mentioned some excess capacity earlier in our forces and probably a need down the road for a BRAC, which none of us particularly like and often fear.