Michael Bennet

It's nice to see that some of the early drugs have been drugs that fight cancer.

It's fashionable to criticize the agency. This is a place where the FDA has really gotten it right.

All of us want to keep jobs here, and we want to give patients safe and effective drugs as soon as possible.

In my view, the FDA has been extremely successful implementing the breakthrough therapy pathway, which has led to the approval of 32 lifesaving drugs and over 100 more in the pipeline.

I think the testimony has just been excellent, and what comes through to me is that there is a compelling consensus that what we are doing now does not work and that we have got to change it, and it is long overdue.

We should not accept it, either.

We are all in this together. We are one nation, and this--I cannot think of an issue where it is more true than here.

We are managing our forests in the most fiscally irresponsible manner we can manage them.

If it were up to me--it is not, unfortunately, up to me--we would have a standing committee of the Senate that was focused on our kids and on their future.

The politics that are so corrosive in this place should be utterly unacceptable when we are facing that kind of challenge as a country.

It makes you feel like you want to be dead.

These numbers are staggering. They are not, obviously, just numbers. It is human lives in what we think of as the greatest country in the world.

To have a single mother of two kids working for $7.25 still be below the poverty line because we have allowed the minimum wage to collapse over the last 50 years, I think is a disgrace.

And I always think when I am there, first of all, what the character must have been like, the collaboration must have been like, and how empty the political conversation here would sound to the people that built Silverton.

I am confident that with Senator Bennet's bill, the Gold King Mine Spill Recovery Act of 2015, our local community, our state, and the federal government, that a lot of those people will be made whole.

I have been asking questions of the Commissioner, so let me ask you one question, which is, is there more that Senator Gardner and I can do to be helpful to you as you try to interact with these federal agencies or think about what…

I mean, you cannot come from the north or south to Silverton and not think about the character of the people that built that community.

For Colorado and downstream communities, there are still serious concerns that exist that the EPA must address.

Well, I appreciate it, and I just want to, as Chairman Gardner said at the outset, thank each of you for taking time to come here today.

The EPA has committed to constructing a temporary treatment plant, as you know, but has not yet committed to finding a way to construct a permanent facility, which I think both of us would like to see.

Thank you, and since there are no other Senators here today, I can say today without fear of contradiction that it is an enormous privilege to represent the most beautiful state in the country, Colorado.

Look, I think everybody agrees that the EPA messed this one up, right.

I have said that the EPA should be held to the same standard as EPA would hold a private company for the spill.

Thank you so much for holding this hearing and thank you for including me. You did not need to do that.

It is my hope that the EPA's Office of Inspector General's report will provide more clarity and transparency on the spill.