James Lankford

It is good to see you again.

But just making sure it gets off the critical list would be essential to us because there are so many critical items all the way down.

We just need to make sure all the locks and everything work first.

Yes, it is critical.

This is not one designed to hurt you.

We are trying to be able to work through helping the Corps by figuring out the inventory of what you have, where are the priorities.

Can I recommend to the committee that we have a closed door meeting with the Corps of Engineers and with OMB together?

As that approaches, all Americans are thinking about tax policy now. We just want to be able to make it as clear and as accurate as we can, from the IRS coming out to the American people, to be able to make sure that there is the least…

We appreciate you being here and doing the hard work. You all have done a lot of work behind the scenes to be able to get to this point, to be able to do this, and we do appreciate it.

The issue about an interpretive rule and whether something is economically significant...

Which, by the way, I do not think you are getting any disagreement from us on that.

OK. Additional elements that need to be addressed in this memorandum of agreement that are unaddressed.

Talk to me about the Congressional Review Act and the engagement with Treasury and IRS on the CRA.

I get that. No, I am not going to hold you to it, as we are going through some of the possibilities for review.

They are dangerous people when they have nothing to do. Yes.

Help me understand that part, especially the part about 'with the assistance of OMB.'

This may be an ongoing conversation with Small Business Administration and others that just want to be able to have people at the table.

That is extremely helpful to get the context on this.

Hopefully the last one, because that was cleaning up the mess from the first one, but that is a whole different issue.

I am quite confident someone that is listening to this hearing would be exceptionally interested in that.

This will have a court challenge and cost the taxpayers millions of dollars.

You need to slow down. We need better information.

OK. Talk to me about the speed of that. How quickly can they get an answer back?

Well, let us ask OIRA, shall we? What is a good expectation for a time period, because clearly, as we have discussed before, and Senator Portman brought up, there is no goal here of trying to slow down the process with IRS, because many…

We need to continue to be able to use those faith-based and nongovernmental groups to be able to partner with them.