Barbara Mikulski

I want to salute Senator Durbin on his thoughtful amendment and thank him for his collegiality in negotiations. We think it helps us. But we have been misled, manipulated, and disregarded in our attempts to get information from the Postal…

If I may respond to the Senator, first of all, I do thank the Senator for the substitute. I think it does make substantial improvements in the bill. It demonstrates that the Senator is listening to colleagues and also to people who are…

I rise to speak on the Buffett rule. How much time is allocated to me? The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. There is 18 minutes remaining on the Senator's side of the aisle.

So I say, Mr. Chairman and colleagues, if we are talking about RIF notices in July, we know that people will begin to worry in May and April.

I am excited about moving the user fees process forward.

In summary, we should have a sense of urgency and adherence to our own timelines and compliance issues?

I am going to welcome our panel.

Maryland is the home of life science jobs.

If there are no further questions, Senators may submit additional questions for the official record.

The subcommittee stands in recess, subject to the call of the chair.

We need to justify it to the taxpayer, and we need to show it in the scientific community.

If anything gets screwed up, I can't pull a rabbit out of the hat. I don't have a rabbit, and I don't have a hat.

Last year, this subcommittee took a major step with the bipartisan concurrence of everyone to make sure we put the JWST on track.

The subcommittee reserves the right to hold others should the need arise.

We feel that with the JWST, we are continuing to secure America's pre-eminence in astronomy and astrophysics.

We spend a lot of our time keeping it focused and on line because it continually comes to us with underestimates.

I think there is growing frustration and skepticism about this.

We are still pretty much in the same money that we were 15 years ago.

We were concerned that the JWST was off track, off budget, and we were concerned that it was going to be cancelled not because of technology dysfunction but because of management dysfunction.

It cost us $50 billion to build ISS.

Isn't this a hell of a lot of money for a 3-year effort?

This $17 billion-plus budget request is pretty much the same as what it was when President Clinton and Vice President Gore were in the White House.

We want NASA to be an economic engine, out-innovating, out-educating, and out-building what we need to do to keep America pre-eminent in space;

We view Canada, Japan, who itself is facing some challenges with their own budget because of the natural disaster--we treasure the relationship with Japan both in space, science, and in national security.

So we need that, but we need to look ahead also to what is the science today and what is the science of the future.