Lamar Alexander

So we are collecting $105 million in taxes for the purpose of fixing the locks and we are only spending $26 million for fixing the locks?

The President's budget estimates the Inland Waterways Trust Fund revenues, the taxes collected, for the purpose of helping the locks for this next year, are $105 million dollars.

Since 2014, working with the Corps, once we created the priority list of projects, Congress has appropriated all of the tax money that we collected.

And increasing the fee has raised the annual revenues to the Trust Fund by about $20 million a year since 2014.

We tried very hard the last few years to really do what a great country would do for the Inland Waterway Trust Fund.

The reason this budget request is such a problem is that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers touches the lives of almost every American.

We're here today to review the president's fiscal year 2018 budget request for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation.

I value the relationship we have, and the way we are able to work together with our staffs.

If there are 500,000 unfilled jobs for construction workers today, I would hope that would be evidence that there is room for apprenticeship programs in the construction industry.

I would urge the White House, the President, and you to--I mean, this is the Senate's opportunity to confirm, to vet, to question these nominees.

My guess is most of those come from the Office of Management and Budget, too. So if we want to reduce some of those administrative tasks and free up more money for research grants that would be a good area to work on.

If there is to be any change to this, Congress wants to be involved. And I'm going to get in the middle of that, and I'll bet I can get a bipartisan group up to make sure we are.

The net effect of taking that from 28 to 10 or anything like it would be less research, and less research, we've just reminded ourselves, means more jobs moving overseas to cluster around the research wherever it is in the world.

Is it true that around these universities...grow complexes of industries who are attracted by the research and who, as a result, create jobs around these centers of research?

We want to accelerate it, not slow it down.

We're all excited about the future of the National Institutes of Hope, as you call it.

The budget proposes to eliminate ARPA-E, and that's not what we're going to do.

General Klotz testified that operating the MOX project would cost at least twice as much as operating the dilute and disposal method.

Let's talk about the dilute part of dilute and disposal first.

I think we're fortunate to have you in this job at this point because this is a job that we two politicians haven't been able to solve yet.

If we specifically appropriate general appropriation funds this year for you to continue the work needed to be prepared to take title to use nuclear fuel and store it at a private site, will you be able to use those funds to make progress…

Do you believe we should work on all options for used nuclear fuel at the same time, and if progress on one stalls, should we continue to work on the other options?

Do you believe we would be able to place used nuclear fuel in a private consolidated interim storage site more quickly than it could be disposed of in Yucca Mountain?

Do you support building a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain?

I think there are ways to deal with the spent fuel that are appropriate from the standpoint of how you deal with nuclear energy.