Roughly half of my congressional district, which is larger than nine states, is Federal land.

We have been fighting here in Congress, myself and several others, to try to get wildland firefighters paid a decent wage, the wage that they deserve.

Our broken and lengthy NEPA permitting regime should not be an excuse as to why we are not taking part in proper forest management.

Thank you, Chairman Tiffany, and I am glad to be here, and certainly glad to see once again a slate of several bipartisan bills on the agenda for today's legislative hearing.

Thank you, Mr. Smith, for both your written testimony and your oral testimony.

I wonder if you might be able to, I suspect you are aware of this, and if you could provide maybe the Committee some clarity on that front.

It is just a great example of common-sense legislating that cuts through the partisan divide.

I think the bill makes a lot of sense, and I am hoping that we can get it done in short order.

I am grateful to you and to the work that the Forest Service is doing and has done over the course of the last several years.

As Members of Congress, it is our No. 1 responsibility to continue supporting their efforts, in my view, and to provide further resources to our Federal land management agencies as they prepare for the wildfires to come, and plan for…

The status quo is absolutely unacceptable, and it should be unacceptable to all of us.

Immigrants make our country better.

Their border bill is a fantasy.

We have eight million unfilled jobs in the country.

It is time that Congress does its job and engages in bipartisan compromise and finds a real fix.

The response to such a significant challenge shouldn't be to demonize immigrants, but it also shouldn't be to refuse to compromise.

the $433 million in budget cuts that have been proposed by my Republican colleagues.

I think the first observation is that the reason we are talking about deferred maintenance is because we deferred it to start with, and that is a result of chronic underfunding of the National Park Service over a long, long period of time.

I will say I would be remiss before providing some opening remarks if I didn't recognize my good friend from Colorado on his recent announcement regarding his retirement from this august body.

I certainly couldn't agree more with my colleague from New Mexico as she articulated the many benefits of GAOA, and the way in which the large-scale investments are supporting the ever-growing popularity of parks and public lands across…

Now, I think we also almost all agree that the Great American Outdoors Act was a great development.

So, we can talk here about deferred maintenance, but we are only repeating the problem by our appropriations decisions.

I certainly agree that oversight of this program's implementation is and should be a priority.

I thank the Ranking Member for yielding time. Republicans have had the majority in this House for 11 months, and what do they have to show for it? Nothing--no efforts to grow the middle class, no efforts to lower costs, no efforts to build…

the lack of adequate funding for tribal forestry impacts public safety