One of my biggest concerns with the Forest Service is the impact that fire suppression costs are having on other program areas within the agency.

Our common goal is to establish credible, sustainable wildfire budgets without decimating non-fire-related programs.

Chairman Dicks has been a champion in this regard, and I thank him for his leadership.

I hear this from Forest Service employees quite frankly all over the country that have talked to me and their concern of the morale.

I fully believe we need to do what we can in terms of climate change and trying to address climate change and carbon emissions and so forth.

Somehow we have to get the message out to the public. And that is when Congress will respond.

And no matter what rules you put in place, somebody is going to violate those. If you are a crook, you are a crook.

I also want to thank you for your willingness to assist my office with some complex Forest Service issues in my home State of Idaho.

One of the big complaints they have is that consolidation at Albuquerque and the difficulty it has made their job.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I think we should thank him for the job he has done over the last several years.

And we lose a lot of children by not interacting with them appropriately in the first 3 years of their development.

What I would like is--and when I say blow it up, is to create, you know, in your mind a theoretical in an ideal world, the utopia that you talked about, what would it look like...

They just have fewer people amongst whom to split up the costs, and so it is more per homeowner.

I have always said, and I am a big supporter of education and math and science and all that, I know it is important, but when we do that at the expense of the arts then I think we lose something.

As a long time supporter of the arts and sometimes called a struggling artist myself, I look forward to each of you sharing your views on the Federal role in supporting culture in the arts.

I want to commend you because every Chairman likes to be commended by his Ranking Member.

I would just close this comment by saying that, you know, we recognize that there is a direct economic, cultural, social and natural resource relationship between healthy environment, healthy ecosystems and healthy communities.

What is important to us with this regulatory procedure is that the EPA follow what we call around here 'regular order.'

What are we doing to coordinate the hundreds of millions of dollars we are spending on climate change?

I hope you can do what you can to tie the mission of the agencies to the future.

Science must be the compass guiding our environmental protection decisions; we cannot make the best decisions unless we have confidence in the integrity of the science on which we rely.

Small communities simply cannot afford these loans; in fact, that is one of the real problems we have.

I am also puzzled by the fact that the capital improvement and maintenance portion of your budget is slated to receive an additional $50 million.

And why OMB looks at the Forest Service and says that and does not say it in some other area is of concern.