Lloyd Bentsen: “let me start out by congratulating the committee for putting together this legislation and putting together the…”

“let me start out by congratulating the committee for putting together this legislation and putting together the conference report. This is a very good bill. I think it says a lot about the Congress that it has been able to respond as quickly as it has to the events of September 11 and the subsequent events of anthrax that we felt right here on Capitol Hill. Subsequent to September 11, I had the opportunity to meet with the heads of a number of the institutions in the Texas Medical Center which is in my congressional district and is the largest medical center in the United States. In discussions with those individuals, I learned that while we had the knowledge throughout the United States in our various medical complexes to deal with the threat of bioterrorism, we did not necessarily have the means to deploy that knowledge. We really were not prepared to deal with it. And so a number of the institutions followed the lead of the Committee on Energy and Commerce and others in the Congress to try and address this and say that the Federal Government and the taxpayers would make an investment in making sure that we could deploy those medical assets the next time there is an attack.”