Susan Collins

We should be respecting individuals' wishes.

We have to make sure that everyone understands their options.

I do not know that we should be encouraging college students to fill out advance directives and POLST orders.

Americans are the only people on earth who believe that death is negotiable.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the Highway Trust Fund will become insolvent in fiscal year 2015.

But I must say that I was disappointed that the President's plan is not supported by a serious proposal to finance it.

The terrifying bridge collapse that occurred in Senator Murray's State just 3 weeks ago once again highlights the importance of maintaining our Nation's highways and bridges.

But I think, writ large around the country, one of the things we're still struggling with is, there are a lot of places where people don't want to pay tolls.

What other sources of revenue would be available? Are there any innovative approaches being tried by the States?

MAP-21 is only a 2-year bill instead of the traditional 6-year bill, because we were unable to find further funding.

In this time of severe budgetary challenges, we are going to need to find political consensus on how to sustainably fund surface transportation over the long term.

It's clear that additional investments are necessary.

I want to join you in welcoming our witnesses. And I very much appreciate your scheduling this hearing so that we can discuss in very concrete terms, no pun intended, the needs of our Nation's crumbling infrastructure.

I believe that we authorized $750 million for this year and $1 billion for next year, and that it's estimated that $1 billion in TIFIA funding could leverage $10 billion in actual lending capacity.

I so share the administration's belief that investment in transportation is critical to the health of our economy and to our economic recovery.

The Nation has four top cyber risks, and the first one listed is one that has been of great concern to me since we produced the bill last year that, unfortunately, could not get past a filibuster.

In that legislation, we did pay attention to the need for a more expert cyber workforce.

I just wanted to clarify that because perhaps that is one issue we could put to rest.

We have publicly, privately, and repeatedly urged our Russian counterparts to cease arms sales and deliveries to Syria.

I do not support the sequestration process and believe we should be setting priorities

It's too soon to tell.

This strikes me as not fair, but it also strikes me as leading to a perverse outcome.

Is a reduction in market share a goal of this administration?

Obviously, $943 million is a lot of money and is of great concern to us, or to me.

It's important because it provides mortgage insurance for the construction of multifamily housing, hospitals, healthcare facilities.