Heidi Heitkamp

Thank you so much. And, if I can just make one point, this whole problem, it seems to me, transitions to our broader issue, which is how do we recruit the next generation of Federal workforce.

So, at your level of managing this are you looking strategically at each one of these border crossing locations' staffing?

I am so pleased that today we are going to focus on a topic that is so important to my home State of North Dakota.

You have to deal with multiple agencies, and you will have to do that on their time and go through their processes.

This is incredibly frustrating, because the time when we could have been producing oil at $100 a barrel...

I am glad that you are talking about centralizing this.

It is not public land. It is land that is owned by sovereign nations.

These are not public lands.

We constantly try and deal with the facts that are in front of us instead of looking at this in an historic context.

The data that you are presenting and the information you are presenting is not presented in a way that is accessible to the public.

Except what people hear is 'blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.'

I think that is pretty clear. There is something about what we are not communicating in terms of the science that is not getting through.

We are up against a huge social media network where things get said that should be challenged, but yet we do not seem to find the way to challenge them.

This is not a new issue. During the 1990s, I served on something called Trade and the Environment Policy Advisory Committee for the USTR where European labeling of genetically engineered foods was starting to surface as an issue in terms…

I believe the science is so strong in this area that these are products that will not have an adverse effect in any way on health.

These are minerals that belong to a different sovereign nation.

I would welcome the opportunity to talk about what we need to do, because a lot of people do not understand jurisdictional challenges.

We are an endangered species.

It is going to stress another area.

You cannot protect a whole State when you have a huge amount of land and a huge opportunity for people who are peddling poison to basically go undetected.

There is no place in the United States where you have more responsibility than Indian country.

It's very telling when you have a Democrat Senator who is generally supportive of the EPA's efforts calling the final rule a 'slap in the face.'

I think sometimes people who write press releases should be more controlled in what they say.

We do want a clear delineation, or as clear of a delineation as what we can get, on expectations between us and the agencies on what constitutes guidance.

We need to make sure that what we are doing with all of this body of work is not taking shortcuts.