Tom Carper

I want to thank both of my colleagues for yielding their time to me.

The NRC recently decided to suspend granting new and renewed regular licenses, so that the NRC could address the Federal court ruling regarding waste confidence.

I think the industry is working very hard to comply with the required information in a given time period.

Currently, our country has some 104 nuclear power plants operating in I think about 31 States.

The question is, is it perfect? Probably not. Can it be made better? It probably could.

Terrific. Thank you all very, very much. Thank you.

One of the main reasons we hear that tax reform has again become necessary is the proliferation of new tax breaks added, some of them since 1986.

We are trying to pass some cybersecurity legislation to safeguard our country and help us on our national security and on our economic security.

I think that is an enormously positive development and we are hoping that it continues.

I want to make sure that you are hearing it directly from them so you can make the best informed judgment.

The way we talked about it, just to share with you, we consider the use of data and leveraging the information age in new and effective ways as the major game changer in the area of improper payments.

I personally was very gratified to hear the line of questioning that went along the lines of internal controls.

Judge us not based on the structure of that Council. Judge us on whether we are both actively engaging stakeholders.

I often like when I get to the end of hearing, sometimes I will ask the panelists to kind of reflect back on what has been said.

The last time our national debt was this high was at the end of World War II. That level of debt was not sustainable then. It is certainly not sustainable today.

It is our responsibility in Congress and in the Administration to ensure that all this money is spent as intended and that, at the end of the day, we see real results.

I think we ought to underline some points before we wrap this up and I go start voting.

This is testimony to essentially congressional oversight.

I appreciate you all being here and for this conversation today and the work that Senator Lautenberg and certainly Senator Inhofe and others have done on this issue.

One of the things we need to do is to look in every nook and cranny of the Federal Government and try to find ways to do everything we do, to ask the question, is there a way to get a better result for less money?

We also like to say transparency is the best disinfectant, and the idea of exposing as much of what we do, good and bad, will help us, I think for the most part, do a better job.

You are, as the Chairman has noted, a faithful attender and a faithful participant, and I certainly commend you for that.

We cannot just take all the data that is collected by the Federal Government and have a data dump to the American public.

One of the challenges of the Census Bureau is to build up recognition and trust and information and familiarity with the American Community Survey.

I think there were over a thousand partners for the decennial census who would be trusted.