Dick Durbin

Last month Senator Durbin and I co-sponsored an amendment to the Energy bill that increases the authorized funding levels for the Office of Science by about 7 percent per year.

The target for fiscal year 2017 is about $1.18 billion, yet the Administration only proposes to spend $986 million.

The Senate adopted our amendment.

I have worked with Secretary Darcy and General Bostick, and I thank them for this, over the past few years.

As a Californian, is really unacceptable.

This budget proposal is a huge step backwards in this area.

I believe President Obama should make funding our Nation's waterways a priority, but this year's budget request certainly does not reflect that.

The Blue Ribbon Commission concluded that 'it would be prudent to pursue the development of consolidated storage capability without further delay,' and Sen. Feinstein and I agree with that recommendation.

The Administration's budget proposes major cuts for this program as well.

Stopping construction of this project does not make sense.

We hear about unhappy Americans today in this election season.

Over the past 5 years, Senator Feinstein and I have worked hard with the department to keep costs under control.

The President's budget request this year is at best unhelpful, and at worst it's misleading.

I believe Yucca Mountain can and should be part of the solution, but we have more used fuel than Yucca Mountain's legal capacity.

What kind of buy in do we have from our NATO allies to make this stand in Europe to stop any potential aggression by Putin?

Senator Feinstein and I are united on; developing new nuclear technologies such as accident-tolerant fuels, small reactors, advanced reactors.

One El Nino year alone will not be enough to end this drought, and Californians are really hurting.

if we are going to spend three times as much for contractor employees and you are cutting civilians and increasing contractor employees, we need to have some more data to make sure that we are not making the wrong decision.

I believe that if somehow we can get a sufficient increase in our allocation, that we should, in fact, make Mission Innovation a priority.

I have also recommended paying for increases like that by ending subsidies for mature technologies.

The one element to remember is we have been told repeatedly these contractor employees cost three times as much as civilians.

I do not believe that Congress will accept the administration's proposal to cut funding for the Army Corps of Engineers by $1.3 billion or the Bureau of Reclamation by $163 million.

I wholeheartedly support this effort to strengthen our position in Europe, the European reassurance initiative, which we have discussed.

This is not a realistic proposal.

This kind of budgeting is at best unhelpful, at worst misleading.