James Lankford

I think it is very important that those department heads are able to respond to those threats.

The Committee takes these nominations extremely seriously, so we are pleased to have strong nominees before us today.

The challenge every judge has, regardless of their role, is setting aside your own biases.

There is a difference between effective and duplicative.

But only $2 billion in disbursements.

I would be glad to be able to get that, because that may broaden out and accelerate some of the process as well.

I am concerned that the FDA has a requirement and that they are trying to fulfill that requirement to be able to get the drug to market, but that it may inadvertently doom some child or some adult to be stuck in a situation where they are…

I have people in this study that are terminal, and that you are allowing the study to be able to go through, to the end, when you see an obvious effect.

How do you all deal with the moral issues and the ethical issues of leaving those that are getting the placebo--knowing that they are in a terminal status, as opposed to trying to shift them over?

When the first level is done and patients hear the stories--or people that are not patients hear the stories--this seems to be effective, but then there is the pause to say, 'We are going to go through multiple other areas.'

OK. Talk to me about the internal conversation about acceptable risk.

So the 45 minutes is not just completing the form. It is gathering information.

How do you track, at this point, research that would be done by the public sector and research that would be done only by us?

Okay, so FERC first and then DOE, correct? So that has been a quick process. It has not been an issue?

This is one of the areas I want us to provide more oversight as a committee to be able to ask just the basic questions.

So what I want to be able to evaluate is, before the money goes out the door, we have a set of evaluation metrics that we know about this grant.

If you are seeing something that is ongoing that the public sector is already doing and we can accelerate it?

Right. That is what I was trying to pick up, the timeline for that.

If there are additional authorities that are needed on that, we just need to know

Obviously if we have an area where we are not authorizing or allowing or transferring, we do not want it to be more expensive than actually maintaining it.

We have talked a couple of times before about the 2014 water bill that put into it a request to the Corps to say give us an inventory that is not needed--this was the quote--'not needed for the mission of the Corps of Engineers.'

Solving the nuclear waste stalemate is something Senator Feinstein and I are dedicated to

We should not make nuclear power a primary solution, or one of the primary solutions, to dealing with that problem

It has obviously been extremely important to this subcommittee and to myself as well, that we continue to promote the value of religious freedom around the world.

We hope to be able to put products out in the days ahead to say, let us help fix some of the broken relationships that we have there.