George Voinovich

In my opening statement, I talked about having a strategic plan with milestones and metrics to respond to the recommendation of GAO.

I have been very concerned about the management of the State Department.

I stole it from David Walker.

I know I have talked to Senator Kerry about getting something permanent.

You have different standards for investigations depending on what the call for is with the agencies----

I think that you should all sit down, or have somebody really spend some time on this to work this thing out.

Mr. Chairman, could I just follow up on that? This is kind of repetitious of many of these hearings that we have had over the years.

I would be interested, one of the things that many of us were concerned about is whether or not the DNI could reconcile some of the differences between the agencies in terms of reciprocity.

You have got that portion of it. I just assume that the plan to go forward with the IT part of this, the technology you are going to use, you have already identified it, correct?

I witnessed firsthand the challenges this presented for the staffer as well as the impact it had on the office as a whole.

More than 4 years after our first hearing, the DOD's security clearance process remains on GAO's High-Risk List and I see little evidence of progress thus far in furtherance of Congressional security clearance reform mandates.

That will enter a 30-day public comment stage by the end of the month.

And I assume that there is no problem with human capital? You have the people that you need to get the job done, that is not a problem?

Reforming the security clearance process and removing DOD's personal security clearance process from GAO's High-Risk List are priorities for me in, as Senator Akaka said, my final Congress.

And that understanding among the agencies is part of this review that you are doing?

Oh, I have to tell you, 1 percent, it is amazing.

So the majority of them go through the regular system----

I am eager to learn more about this issue as well as the other obstacles that could be avoided with better oversight and management of our security clearance process.

You are talking about natural gas. We encouraged our electricity to go to natural gas. Our gas prices went up to the top.

The other thing that I want to comment on is the issue of--in your testimony, you talked about a major reason why low carbon renewable resources and energy efficiency are not used more extensively, that the cost of greenhouse gas emission…

I wish the President, when he talks about the issue of becoming oil independent, should talk about the fact that not only are we going to use less, but we are going to go after those areas where we can responsively find oil.

So I thought to myself on many occasions what we should be doing as a Nation, from a public policy, security, energy, and so forth, is that we should take advantage of all of the natural resources that we have.

It seems to me that today over 60 percent of our oil is coming from overseas, and about 60 percent of that is coming from the OPEC nations.

I introduced a bill with Byron Dorgan called NESA, the National Energy Security Act, and one of the reasons I did that is because of the fact that I have been concerned for a long time that we haven't harmonized our energy, our economy…

Tackling the climate change problem is not something we can do alone.