Jeff Merkley

Virtually no stewardship projects ended up in court in Oregon.

What are the forms of lethal military assistance that would best serve our goals of supporting the Ukrainian Government while not provoking, if you will, Russian escalation?

I will just say my experience has been extremely frustrating with the Department of State, and when you say they are committed, those are, at this point, empty words.

So it is important to follow up the philosophy you just expressed with actual action.

May I have 2 minutes to conclude my statement? The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Is there objection? Without objection, it is so ordered.

We need to have our leaders at the highest level expressing their disapproval of these domestic actions in Turkey.

It is important for the United States to publicly stand for its own values and the values that the Turkish Government purportedly seeks to uphold.

It is troubling that a NATO ally may have tampered with election results to allow its president to consolidate power.

I would argue that the United States needs to continue engaging publicly in terms of expressing our support.

I do oppose this because essentially when there is consideration of listing, you are on the verge of a listing, there has been a surge in hunting for species that this would encourage.

There is a proposal to move the State Department Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration to the Department of Homeland Security. Good idea, bad idea?

Security risks often flow with an influx of refugees.

There is no indication that the administration has raised the issues that Senator Young has talked about.

In this power struggle that became a tribal conflict, is there a way to put the pieces back together? And if so, how?

I strongly believe, and we at the ICRC strongly believe that states, especially those that are directly or indirectly involved, and supporting partners, can exercise their leverage over the warring parties on the ground.

I believe that U.S. leadership, in whatever shape or form it comes, is key and can make a difference, yes.

I only hope that in any negotiations on the humanitarian assistance budget, Members of Congress avoid splitting the difference between what has been proposed and what expanding needs require.

The effort to maintain funding must continue--as the voices of the world's most vulnerable populations must be heard.

The massive cuts proposed in President Trump's FY 2018 budget, particularly regarding support for international organizations involved in humanitarian response, for the International Disaster Assistance (IDA) account and for the Migration…

I appreciate the opportunity to join this panel and hope that my testimony helps bring more attention to the increasingly dire situations.

My view, and the view of UNICEF, is that we have to address not just the symptoms, but the causes.

To have this happen by accident for 16 months in a row is less than 1 out of 1 trillion times 1 trillion. In other words, there is nothing accidental about this.

Is it essential, as this UNICEF report points out, that we aggressively, as an international community, take on what is often called global warming, which I refer to as climate disruption?

Our current executive branch, the Trump administration, has cut all funding to UNFPA, drastically reducing the assistance available for responding to women in these situations.

Particularly in the refugee camps, it seems like we could somehow provide more security to diminish this.