Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Is there anybody on the panel who disagrees with the need for a more robust rail tank car than the DOT-111s?

But wouldn't it be great if you had a tool to say, Well, if you charge, we are going to charge you.

Twenty-eight years on this committee and I have seen a lot of changes.

Good for you, and I hope you do a lot more of that.

We need a system that is risk-based, that sets proper prioritization, but it has to also be robust and faultless.

Yeah, but maybe it is a little more, a few more tools are necessary.

Why aren't there more test sites? We limited it to six, but why couldn't we have more?

Have your lawyers really looked at that to see whether or not there is a way around that, or are we going to need to legislate to fix that?

Are we seriously pursuing a risk-based approach, which just makes so much sense to me?

I mean, because right now these things are invisible.

Well, geographic makes a lot of sense as a starting point for risk-based approach.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

How about a system where we require registration, licensure with user fees.

If the trust fund can cover 100 percent, we make it mandatory spending, then, we are going to have these stupid issues with shutdowns and sequestration.

Why can't we harmonize those things two things and say Europe and the United States ought to move together?

I will miss Nick a lot.

H.R. 4256 is so poorly drafted that it is hard for me to say exactly what it does.

Clearly, ESA as written and implemented can be improved upon, and I look forward to hearing from the witnesses on the bills before us today.

They sunset the protections of the ESA, as if the extinction crisis were over, as if no more imperiled species needed further protection, as if we have learned nothing from the passenger pigeon.

Unfortunately, none of the bills embraces these common-sense strategies.

Now that the listing has been finalized, the bill seeks to unravel those protections, gambling the bird's fate on a recently adopted range-wide plan that would be unenforceable, unproven, and unable to stop the hemorrhaging.

The bill would do virtually nothing to help farmers in this severe drought, while driving endangered species in the Bay Delta estuary closer to extinction.

The expansion of the CEs, which I have advocated for, for a number of years, has worked quite well in Texas and Washington and elsewhere.

the most notable failure in the Northwest, of course, is the Columbia River Crossing.

Today we would be paying off the last of our national debt.