Hal Rogers: “There is no more important chore that the Congress has, in my judgment, than to protect the country as best we can from…”

“There is no more important chore that the Congress has, in my judgment, than to protect the country as best we can from its enemies and from natural disasters. That is what this bill is all about. It is such a huge undertaking. We have got 7,500 miles of borders with our neighbors, we have 12,000 miles of coastline, including the Great Lakes, 440 commercial airports with 600 million passengers a year internally and many millions more from outside the country, rail and subways and tunnels and bridges and cyber structures, and the financial system. Everything we have is subject to attack, and it is a very, very difficult chore for the government, both the executive branch and certainly the legislative branch, to try to get our arms around the mission and to try to find the moneys there to try to finance the effort to defend the country against its enemies. But I think we have done that within this bill as best we can. We have covered practically every angle that you can think of with plenty of funding. I am especially pleased that we found huge new sums to spend on border security. We can't exist as a country if we can't protect that border, and that is what this bill is all about in its main emphasis.”