Our taxpayers back home are concerned about their life cycle, and we are spending a lot of their money, sometimes for very little result.

The MOX facility cancellation and subsequent repurposing for plutonium pit production has been done without a competitive bid process.

As I was saying, this is 2019, we should be able to get this right.

I have rarely heard of a competitive bid situation in which one bidder is twice as expensive as the other bidder, and yet there is such enthusiasm for bidding--awarding the bid to the by far, the highest bidder.

It seems like this decision is really not being presented to Congress as a decision, but more as a fait accompli.

I think the public wants to see the best that we can possibly do is the best that can be done by human beings.

Mr. Hamilton, in your testimony you noted that the four waste drums at the Idaho Advanced Retrieval Project which exploded were a 'near miss,' and that there was 'some degree of luck that nobody was there to get hurt.'

I believe our military has the capability to walk and chew gum at the same time. I think we can handle multiple priorities simultaneously and do them right and do them well.

Sir, can I add just in a few seconds, of all of the work we have ahead of us, the most important work we do right now is stand up the new combatant commander, because that normalizes the business of warfighting going forward.

The subcommittee will come to order.

I would like to ask unanimous consent that opening statements be inserted for the record.

I would like to ask our unusual unanimous consent so that members of the full committee, like Mr. Lamborn, are also able to participate in the subcommittee questioning.