Jon Tester

In some cases in Southeastern Montana, people are going to have to get their mail in Wyoming because there is not going to be a post office for 40 miles.

You have important jobs, important connections, and quite frankly, from my constituency's base, you are a big deal because you can make a difference.

I think I make a lot of money in the U.S. Senate, and he makes over triple.

When times are tough, when you start cinching your belt down, that ought to be the first place we are looking, not the last place.

I know the value of the rural post office back home.

If the President stood up tomorrow and said if you want to serve your country, be qualified as a mental health care worker, go work at the VA, go work at the DOD and we are going to pay you and we are going to support you and we are going…

The inability for the VA to recruit and retain doctors and surgeons is a big, big, big issue.

It is completely unacceptable, and I know Montana is not the only State in this boat.

It just seems to me that it would be a natural follow-on, to contract locally.

We need to reassess every dollar that we spend to make sure that it is being used effectively.

I think whatever it takes to creatively deliver to that point of impact is what we need to come up with.

We cannot repay you. That is just the way it is.

We have some very real challenges coming up; and we all agree that we must provide the funding needed to support this generation of wounded warriors.

Money cannot be the only solution to the problems that they face.

I think we should have some followup conversations with the Committee because that seems to be a hot topic.

If we are really going to utilize small businesses, if we are really going to encourage them to be a part of the equation... we need to look for other small businesses we can grow.

I will be the first one to tell you that low bidder is sometimes low bidder for a reason.

It seems to me that large national firms have an advantage over large local firms on Federal projects.

We need to do a better job of coming together here with reasonable solutions, but these small businesses are not looking for a bailout or a handout.

There needs to be better clarification on what you are using.

We should not allow the large businesses to come in and elbow out the small ones to get those contracts that are set aside for the small businesses.

We need to do a better job making sure that the small business carveout actually does go to small businesses.

I want to welcome the Committee members. This is a great panel, half a dozen folks who can really answer, I think, a lot of questions that need to be answered as we address issues of natural disasters in Indian Country.

In my state of Montana, American Indians deal with everything from severe winter storms, tornadoes, to wildfires, to flooding.

I think you are right. The companies that you folks work with every day, the startups, the entrepreneurs, is really how we are going to get out of the economic downturn that we are in.