Mark Pryor

Thank you and your team for being here today and your preparation and all your answers.

Just want to give you a chance to do that.

I'm pleased to see the research budget increase. I'm concerned on the food safety inspector budget.

I'm very pleased to see the funding increase for ag research.

I think it is time for us to take a look at how we restructure and modernize the system.

I see a proposal to do a, I guess I would say, a realignment of the Farm Service Agency (FSA) offices in which it would probably result in quite a number of closures.

One of the big changes is we lose the direct payments.

Our commitment to our Nation's veterans does not end once the war in Afghanistan is over.

I personally asked your Congressional Affairs staff for help and my staff has reached out twice to seek answers and guidance.

We need to find ways and I think one of Congress' responsibilities should be to really find ways to make this work a lot better than it is working right now.

I do feel that, done right, the regulatory reform effort--the regulatory system can be better, cheaper, and faster.

Unfortunately, I do not think our regulatory environment does that.

We need to find the ways necessary to make those laws fairer and more reasonable and more effective in meeting the dual challenges of protecting the public while making our economy stronger and more competitive.

I have heard from many Arkansans and Arkansas businesses, particularly the smaller businesses that are struggling to meet the increasingly heavy regulatory burden.

I rise to encourage my colleagues to support the nomination of James M. Moody to be a Federal judge in the Eastern District of Arkansas. He is highly qualified, completely noncontroversial, stellar across the board, and meets every…

There will be five votes at 11:15 a.m. tomorrow and a sixth vote at 3:15 p.m. ____________________

If there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it adjourn under the previous order. There being no objection, the Senate, at 7:57 p.m., adjourned until Tuesday, February 25, 2014, at 10 a.m…

We sure do. We handle, as the Senator says, everything from artichokes to catfish and everything in between. In our bill we take the entire Department of Agriculture, with the exception of forestry--that goes to another subcommittee--and…

So you think just, kind of, the nature of 4G LTE helps this issue considerably indoors?

It doesn't make any sense if there is an expectation from a consumer that you are paying for 911 funds out of their hard-earned money and it is being redirected to close budget shortfalls.

We think it is taking funds that were collected from consumers specifically for the 911 purpose and being redirected.

We should never lose sight that the consumer, the end user, is critically important in making this whole thing work.

Thank you for your work on this and many other issues related to this. So thank you for your great service and leadership on that.

I think this topic is critically important.

We definitely support collaboration, but we also realize that there are times, there are occasions when we do need a regulatory body to help us go down that path.