We need to have an accountability structure to see how they are doing, and I appreciate that also being in this legislation.

It is an amazing day that all of you are here, and Congress is gathered to talk about such a critically important subject.

I ask every member of the committee during this hearing, and as we work forward on this bill, to stop and think.

Let's join together and recognize that we have to make sure that those disappearance of their lives shouldn't be a disappearance of our passion and our dedication to this.

As part of my 3-year investigation into the Nation's mental health system, I have been meeting with families and caregivers of those with mental illness. Their number one concern is the HIPAA privacy rule. Since its inception in 2002, the…

The specific culprit was off-the-shelf organic kitty litter.

This was no small oversight failure.

Yet the failure to catch this error reflected a much larger systemic failure.

This leak, along with a separate truck fire the week before, exposed management and oversight shortcomings both at WIPP and at one of the Nation's premier national laboratories, the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

This is the hearing on the Oversight Failures Behind the Radiological Incident at DOE's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.

The root cause of the radiological incident was established in a DOE report this past April.

Since the incident, WIPP has been shut down, and the Department has embarked on remediation, training, and rebuilding that will cost taxpayers an estimated $240 million just to restart limited operations next year.