James Lankford

Going through the Presidential nomination process is the equivalent of a full-body cavity search through everything in your life and everything in your history and everything in your finances.

Right now, we assume quite a few of the writing samples are actually someone else writing it.

You ought to be able to hire someone and get them in a seat in under 30 days.

You cannot legislate culture, just like you cannot legislate good management practices.

If you are in rural Oklahoma, you have not met someone who has worked for the Federal Government before.

How do we get that list? How do we get the list of all those things?

We have to be able to make some decisive steps to be able to get to the future, and that is going to begin with improving our hiring process.

The COVID pandemic I also declare to be the largest pilot program ever done by the Federal Government on innovation and managing people and hiring and basic oversight.

It is incredibly important to be able to be in this conversation, and I really appreciate you getting this out.

Our hiring system is definitely broken, and it shows every time we get to one of these hearings and someone else asks for another way to be able to get around it.

OPM moves from a compliance organization and mother-may-I, to use your term on that as well, to more of a conversation from the Executive Branch.

I think Congress is correct in wanting some kind of check or watchdog to make sure that there are not abuses when these things happen.

If you do not trust me, do not hire me.

Madam Chairwoman, can I ask a couple more questions?

Right. But we are back to Ms. Gerton's statement earlier that that is a shift and a focus for OPM to say I am a facilitator to these individuals that are actually doing it rather than a permission, compliance-based group.

We need to get rid of veterans preference. That is completely wrong.

Go ahead, if you are OK with that.

In Oklahoma, we just had a law passed within our State that has allowed for training for everyone with the school on suicide prevention.

So are there needs that we have as far as a change in statute to allow more of that communication to occur at this point?

We have 13,000 people in schools who have been trained just in the last couple of years, just to be able to help with suicide prevention.

The challenge that we have in this Committee is trying to be able to determine what issues are going to come at us that literally we have to resolve around this dais if we are actually going to move forward on hydrogen.

We have talked about possibilities, but this panel knows extremely well how this conversation about hydrogen being the next thing has been the conversation for about 25 years.

I am particularly proud of my home State of Oklahoma's efforts to grow the hydrogen industry.

The future of hydrogen energy is exceptionally important for us to be able to address here.

Well, if at some point the regulators are not clear on that, obviously, we have to make clarity on that to be able to provide statutory clarity and to be able to say that you do not have to guess because that could change from…