I think you are correct to try to address it in the budget, and we need to take sufficient time to deal with it.

But I am not convinced that we have the authority to use it.

I hope to hear the details about your alternative to dilute the plutonium material.

This is a major decision that Congress has to deal with and that the administration needs to deal with.

But it would require new legislation, would it not?

I hope so-called controversial riders will not be added in the subcommittee or committee.

I want to thank Secretary Moniz for being here today, and also Senator Feinstein.

I want to go back just for a moment to the question of discretionary and mandatory funding again.

The most important legislation in the committee that Senator Murray and I chair is our biomedical innovation legislation.

The President is for a lot of things but among the few things he is really for is his Precision Medicine Initiative.

The idea that you would, in the discretionary fund... come in with a lower amount of money in discretionary funding... that is not very encouraging.

If I may interrupt, if you did it that way, let's say we had a 5-year surge to help launch Precision Medicine, we would not have to spend the same amount every year.

Some of us here in the Senate are in the results business, and a lot of us are on this committee.

So we will formally write the letter would be my suggestion if you would agree.

Thank you, Secretary Darcy, and I greatly appreciate your personal attention to that.

Well, you know the priority I am interested in.

But on the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund, we already got $9 billion that should have been spent on our harbors, yet the President's budget only asks for $986 million, about $194 million short of the target that Congress set for this year.

I want to thank all the witnesses for being here today.

We hope to keep big controversial riders off the committee bill.

I am concerned that the economic analysis for a project may not accurately take into account the true benefits.

A few years ago several of us, including Senator Feinstein, reared back and asked our staff what would a great country like the United States--what kind of harbors do we need.

I would guess that the idea of underfunding the inland waterways and the Harbor Maintenance Account did not come from the Army Corps of Engineers, but probably came from the budget process.

There were several rules of life I learned from my parents, and one that I learned from my father was finish what you start.

But do you not think that has become outdated or inappropriate to base your benefit-to-cost ratio on the way things are today in a lock that has for 12 years been in such bad shape?

What should I say to those commercial barge owners who paid extra taxes so we would use it to improve the locks when we not use it?