Well, I appreciate that answer. I wish my ranchers, and farmers, and others felt the same way.

We need to work this out so that we are all on the same page because I am on your side on what you are trying to do here.

I appreciate what you do, and I would love to entertain you out in Idaho.

the staffing shortage has been an issue across the West, and it has inhibited us from meeting some public lands challenges with the urgency they deserve.

It just seems like writing a new rule in the midst of all this uncertainty before the Supreme Court rules seems premature now.

Indian issues and Indian Country has always been a bipartisan issue on this committee.

One thing I wanted to follow up on what Representative Simpson said about the ability to have advanced appropriations versus mandatory funding.

How much of the current $167.5 million in this year's budget goes to local communities and grants to State and local communities in both the arts and humanities?

We can't wait two decades. That is somebody is born and they become an adult before we can improve their school, that is just too long.

The Indian Health Service has been underfunded for years, and we have tried to increase it and so forth.

I have always found it kind of interesting that our committee, even when I was chair and even before that, we looked at the Arts and Humanities Councils, and we give them the same appropriation.

But basically, we can put all the money into a program in the world. If we don't have the personnel to carry out the projects and so forth that is necessary, it doesn't really do any good.

I appreciate your being here today to shed as much light as you can on the DOE's budget request.

She said that Yucca Mountain had been both a political and a scientific failure. She is half right. It was a political failure.

Using the administration's own numbers, nondefense programs are increased by $105 billion, or 16 percent, while defense programs only go up by $12 billion, or not even 2 percent.

Thank you for taking the time to be here and explain your priorities for us.

I am jealous of the thinking that has gone in, in the State of Washington on hydropower.

I look forward to working with you on this and many other issues that come before the EPA.

We have worked in a bipartisan fashion, regardless of the chairman, over the last--as long as I have been on this committee now I guess for 20 years, 21 years.

As a former State secretary, I know that State and locals know their communities much better than the Federal Government ever could. We have to have an effective partnership.

There is also a bipartisan bill that I am the lead cosponsor of called the REPLANT Act that been reintroduced in the House.

But one of the really important aspects of it, to me, was addressing the backlog of maintenance that we have in our national parks.

Everybody knows, that has been to our national parks, knows that we love them to death.

I am not for closing the doors to the courthouse, but we have to have some action against serial litigators.

You can do it a lot safer and a lot more environmentally friendly, as I have talked with some mining companies.