Haley Stevens: “I thank the Senate for this overwhelming bipartisan support of this bill. It is a bill that I think meets the needs as…”

“I thank the Senate for this overwhelming bipartisan support of this bill. It is a bill that I think meets the needs as best we can of our defense forces and maintains the defense of this country. This year we had a record number of requests to our subcommittee from Members of the Senate and, I might say, also from Members of the House that we had to consider. Were it not for this fine working relationship that the Senator from Hawaii and I have, it would be impossible to deal with a bill of this magnitude in a 24-hour period. But we have done that, and there are a number of people who deserve to be identified now who have worked hard in the preparation of this bill. The Senator from Hawaii has mentioned the people on his side of the aisle. This team works together on a bipartisan basis on the staff level, too. So I want to note the contributions of the subcommittee staff on our side. We have this long record of bipartisan work together: Steve Cortese, who is our staff director; Charlie Houy, staff director on the other side; Peter Lennon, Jay Kimmitt, Mary Marshall, Jim Morhard, John Young, Sid Ashworth, Susan Hogan, Mazie Mattson, Justin Weddle, Candice Rogers, and Emelie East. This year we were assisted by two individuals who were loaned to our committee. As I said, we have just had a tremendous workload this year. We have Darrell Roberson from the Air Force and Mike Gillmore from GAO who worked with us.”