If it was not for our Guard and Reserves, we could not be carrying out our missions around the world.

What can we do to help you head a little faster?

I'm sorry there's no real plan, despite a year-long $5 million effort by the State Department, to stop the looting that greeted our soldiers upon Saddam's fall.

I wouldn't go to bat like that unless they were that good.

the same polluting industries that are supposed to be regulated by this, are writing the regulations.

I hope so, because I don't know what you tell mothers, fathers, and grandparents.

I keep hearing the statement the Bush Administration was the first ever to propose a mercury regulation.

I hope that you will do this the right way, and let us work together.

Last year we went back and forth to add $1.6 billion to the administration's budget request for fiscal year 2004.

The administration submitted a budget clearly short by several hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mr. Secretary, in your budget is a summary on page 1 to 6, take, for example, medical research spending.

No, no. Mr. Principi, it is not that we want more, it is we need more.

To say you've done something you were required to do is commendable, but you were required to do it.

there is a strong bipartisan and growing outcry about the administration's latest retreat from the Clean Air Act in your mercury proposal.

A lot of that was pushed in by the Congress.

Will you give it the allocation?

They know that it is a request that nobody is going to accept, hoping that then Congress will find the money somewhere.

My concerns, if these rollbacks succeed, are that we will undermine not only decades of work restoring Lake Champlain, but countless other rivers, lakes and streams all over the country.

I really get worried--and I have told you this before--on the Veterans Affairs budget.

I appreciate that, and I don't have to leave.

Today, I am concerned that the administration is trying to roll back the Clean Air Act, and to let large pollutants off the hook when it comes to toxic emissions like mercury.

The technology says we could do 90 percent, doesn't it?

The EPA's credibility is gone.

I'm afraid that the Iraqi people who don't feel safe are turning against us.

Each time we've been told, 'This is the final amount,' within months it's anted up considerably more.