Again your testimony, your written testimony notice that again the House passed, the National Apprenticeship Act which is the first update to the Fitzgerald Act which passed in 1937.

Great. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman.

This is really about preventing burnout in a key sector of our economy.

This is an issue that I'm quite honestly, I worked on a bit when I was a State legislator back 25 years ago.

In closing, I want to say a personal thank you to the members of this committee and the broader House Armed Services Committee, past and present.

Good morning, everyone. This morning, the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee meets to hear testimony on the Department of the Air Force fiscal year 2022 budget request.

Well, thank you. I mean, again, when we got the budget, I guess it was like about 10 days ago, I mean, that $800 million increase kind of jumped off the page.

And what I can say as someone, like Chairman Courtney, who has flown in the aircraft recently, is that I think three things are true.

Thank you, Chairman Courtney.

And that is why our plan makes use of the KC-46 in the near term while also fixing that camera as soon as possible.

I was wondering, you know, can you tell us when we are going to see a new schedule?

I think, you know, that this program, as Mr. Wittman said at the outset, is really probably an all-star right now in terms of procurement.

Well, it is great to see, again, one of our heritage shipyards kind of coming back to life with this initiative.

The ability to move quickly goods, equipment, and people at a moment's notice is an urgent priority of our defense operations and plans.

And we had Virginia Foxx and we had John Kline, the Republican Chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, and we had Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and it was a bipartisan lovefest when that bill was signed into law.

I was around in 2014 when we had the bill-signing ceremony at the Executive Office Building when the last WIOA was authorized.

So regarding, you know, just continuing support for the Afghan military, again, you mentioned in your testimony the Afghan Security Forces Fund...

I think, again, if it requires our committee to move with some type of enabling legislation maybe ahead of NDAA, I think, frankly, you know, that's our responsibility.

But, certainly, you know, the context of the agreement, which was that the Taliban would agree to leave--to lay off U.S. troops from February 2020...

I think that the 2,500 troop level, on the advice of the commanders we had a capability, a very lethal capability, to protect the force...

Congress must act. H.R. 3 is the comprehensive reform we need.

This is an opportunity in the infrastructure package to do a major catch-up in terms of really neglect and deterioration in both shipyards.

No one, myself included obviously, wants to stop the wonderful innovation and deployment of life-saving drugs like the one I take.

As President Biden reminded us in his address to Congress last week, we've talked about lowering the cost of prescription drugs for long enough.

Actually, just 3 weeks ago the U.S. Patent Office awarded the NIH a patent on the spike protein technology...