Tom Carper

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a question, but I am not going to ask it now. I just want to flag it for Mr. Cochran with regard to flood risk management and beach nourishment.

It is time to reinvest some of those earnings back into the system.

I think we need to get back to that spirit of, we can do this.

As the 2017 hurricane season illustrated, our nation... needs to be a resilient one that is ready for the next storm, flood, or drought event, because it is coming.

A question again for you, Ms. Ufner, dealing with stakeholder involvement. The ground rule is that stakeholder and project sponsor, in collaboration with the Army Corps of Engineers, is essential to solving our water resource challenges…

We are just not spending the money; we are not investing the money.

By 2020 the total volume of cargo shipped by water is expected to more than double by what it was just 17 years ago in 2001.

The state of our crumbling infrastructure with a grade of D, and we are talking about the kind of situation we face here with our ports, our rivers, and so forth, it is just as bad with respect to roads, highways, and bridges.

In Louisiana, the State and its partners have used these concepts in constructing their own approach.

That loss is roughly the size of the State of Delaware.

Delaware's economic reliance on the Corps' work is not unique.

In past years Senator Inhofe, working with Senator Barbara Boxer, they have been good at showing us how this is done.

Thanks to all of our witnesses for taking time to share with us. This is a really important issue, and encouragingly, an issue that we might actually be able to work on together and get something done.

The likelihood that that family will end up in poverty is 8 percent.

If you take a 16-year-old girl who is in high school, she becomes pregnant, has a child, drops out of school, does not marry the father of her child, there is an 80-percent likelihood they will live in poverty.

The current administration has repeatedly promised to tackle high drug prices. They have neglected to back up the rhetoric with meaningful results, at least to this point in time.

I think you handled yourself very well in front of this committee, and hopefully we can get you up and out as soon as we possibly can.

I am one who believes in going after root causes.

We must work in a bipartisan fashion to really address these concerns and build consensus on a path forward for our economy.

If we do that, we will confound our critics and amaze our friends.

My hope is that when we tackle infrastructure in the months to come, that we do it the right way and we do it together.

We have this reluctance to pay for this stuff.

Investing in infrastructure will not only build the tools necessary so that we can grow our economy; it will create the jobs of the future.

We can't do it on our own; we need a strong Federal partnership.

We need to build upon the prior success of this Committee to provide the wherewithal to modernize our infrastructure.