James Lankford

We will continue to be able to stay on that task as well--as well as the Chairman and the Ranking Member here.

The TSCA language on the science section, do any of the three of you have an issue with that, how it was written for that area, as much as you know the language?

There is an incentive to only publish data that are positive

The weight of evidence is more than just tallying up the number of studies

There was a bill that Senators Lankford and Heitkamp introduced last year that would have required agencies, when writing a new regulation, to plan for how they would review it, 5 or 10 years down the road.

That is interesting to be able to note.

The grant funding should be, at the beginning of it they do the study, not at the end of it

How do we hit a balance on that, because this is not theory anymore?

I think the independence of peer review is critical, where you are actually getting the peer reviewers, and the breadth of that peer review.

The cleanest approach is to adopt the one that the Congressional drafters had

TSCA was so well-received it was voice-voted here in the Senate, as putting in statute, for the first time, something that has been in executive action for a long time.

We need to know--and I think the oversight portion of this feeds into what you just mentioned...

I would encourage dialogue with us. We have a bill dealing with sound science, and it is not a partisan bill.

Agency rulemaking must be informed by independent science advice that is free from political pressure.

You will be glad to know that Oklahoma has more fresh water shoreline than any other State in the union.

How does that work in the science, and I am still thinking about the legislative side of this.

I could not disagree more, but even in emergency situations, where we have seen agencies step in and say, 'This is so vitally important. We need to engage right now for public safety and health,' there are mistakes even in that, and we…

You have to wait for that same fish to swim by again, in the same spot.

You have worked with us before, at OIRA, and you are familiar with the process. What would that look like, as far as an executive action or a codification or--how would you consider something like that fitting into how we do our government?

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) required DHS to come up with some sort of metrics and definition for what does operational control mean of our borders.

Thank you for being here. I appreciated our conversation in my office to be able to talk through a lot of these issues before.

Well, there are things that I know that have been proposed in the past, the Northern Alliance and the Alliance for Prosperity that the United States is partnering with Central America on, specifically those three countries--Guatemala…

People love to do what is significant.

DHS has spent 13 years trying to be able to pull together their HR system.

We believe in the Chickasaw Nation that the best social program is a good job.