Sheldon Whitehouse

Yes, I am sort of preaching to the choir here, I am sure.

Oh, you have more. It would be more per person.

The entire agency process had in effect been a sham, that the result was willful ignorance triumphant.

It is really bad process to begin with. And then it ends up with really unfortunate results.

I think OMB was the political fixer for the Administration in the agency regulatory process in the past.

I would also advise you to watch out for OMB. We have received repeated evidence that OMB has become sort of the political bully boy influencing agency decisionmaking in very often I think inappropriate ways.

The Union of Concerned Scientists pointing out systematic interference with EPA scientists, 60 percent of them indicating that they had been interfered with in their work for political purposes.

My information is that dispute does not extend to EPA. I think that the career people know pretty well what has happened to them in the last 8 years.

Rhode Island, as the Ocean State, has a long tradition of environmental stewardship.

I appreciate the opportunity to be with you.

I believe Eric Holder is the best person to be Attorney General of the United States. It is hard to overstate the significance of the work of the Department of Justice to the American people. It is hard to overstate how vital it is that…

I fully support his efforts for preventive health care, for better pricing on prescription drugs, and for better use of medical technology and information technology.

Your words, 'now' and 'as soon as possible.'

But unless there is a lead time on the other one, we may not avoid it.

I think I am making a slightly different point, thinking longer term about the health care problem per se, and that as that $35 trillion tsunami hits us, we cannot cope with that from a fiscal point of view, so we have to reduce the cost.

The worry I have is that if we do not get started rapidly on those strategies...

It is an absolutely critical choice that our country faces.

I applaud you for your intense focus on health care.

During the course of the Bush administration, the OMB has acquired the role and reputation of being the political fixer and hit man for the administration in agency regulatory proceedings.

I wish to ask, through the Chair, a question of the distinguished chairman of the Budget Committee with respect to the $10 trillion debt the country is now carrying. At the time the current administration that is leaving office came into…

So through the good times, we could have been laying money aside so that when this situation came, we would be in a strong economic condition. Instead, by squandering all those years, we have put the incoming administration in a very…

It strikes me that the problem here is that in order to achieve those large reductions, a considerable amount of executive management, of experimentation, of flexible and dynamic regulatory activity going forward is going to be necessary.

George Bush's Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has written recently that there is $1 trillion a year of excess cost in our health care system, and he is no fool, is he?

I applaud the more honest picture that this budget presents.

We have three major significant problems to deal with. We have one supply of political capital to deal with them.