Rob Portman

It is not too late to prevent further waste in Afghanistan, and it is not too late to prevent the problems in Iraq and Afghanistan from occurring in the next war, whenever and wherever that may be.

I have some of the same concerns that you are, establishing budget numbers without backing them up with good analysis.

Secretary Gates said in a speech that Defense agencies, quote, were not seeing the savings we had hoped for from insourcing.

In 2009, you guys started an insourcing initiative and the goal, as I understand it, was to replace 30,000 contractors with DOD civilians between 2010 and 2015.

Thank you, Madam Chairman.

We are spending more money on service-related contractors in many agencies than we are spending on Federal employees.

There has not been enough talk about freezing the size of the contracting force and freezing the pay of contractors.

Assuming that contractors cost less and that the Federal employees cost more does not help this discussion.

We need to develop a best practices model to help determine when contracting will save taxpayer dollars.

They've just been given another year to operate. But with that very dated technology, the gaseous diffusion technology, as opposed to the centrifuge technology, which is very energy inefficient, among other things, that certainly is not…

I believe we should act as a Congress to avoid that.

I would hope that you and your colleagues would continue to promote this effort, including encouraging my former Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to understand the significant issues you've raised today.

That's well put. As you said, we don't have that capability now because both for the requirement you talked about, which is the U.S. origin unobligated uranium, and also to be able to encourage more countries not to go down the road of…

I was over in the region last week and heard a lot about it publicly and a lot of discussions about their chemical and biological weapons stockpile.

So you have metrics, and the number of kilograms is meeting and maybe exceeding your expectations, because you have metrics in place and you're measuring it? I'm trying to help you here.

Okay. I guess again what we would like is if you could follow up with this hearing, with your more specific response.

I think if you look at where we said we would be and where we are right now in terms of the targets and the number of kilograms of material removed and the number of buildings secured, that we are quite on track at this point.

We find ourselves in a global security environment today starkly different than ones we've faced in the past.

A new round of BRAC would no doubt affect the laboratory enterprise to some degree.

By the way, Deputy Secretary Dan Poneman has been terrific in my view at pointing out this requirement, and also emphasizing the need to have a source as the administration gets even more aggressive in nonproliferation efforts.

I do not know as much about New Zealand, but it certainly is true with Australia and Canada and the UK.

But I do think that you ought to make your initial assessment at least and let it be known to this subcommittee.

It would be absolutely devastating. We have no plans right now for that.

The threats we face as a nation, unfortunately, are not diminishing based on our fiscal problems.

I think President Calderon has been courageous, and I think he is doing the rights things.