Joe Manchin

I wish to thank my colleague Senator Wicker for his longstanding concern about Puerto Rico's current status and how they can govern themselves and work independently. As you can tell, this is a bipartisan concern we have and we are working…

But one thing I would like to say and hope you would consider, just yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported that China's central bank engineered--and I repeat, engineered--the recent decline of its country's currency, which is yet…

I sent you, along with five other regulators, a letter yesterday expressing my concerns with Bitcoin.

Most community banks have had to hire at least one additional compliance officer, and many have had to hire two.

I fundamentally believe it is being used primarily for illegal activities.

In other words, 13 percent of banks with assets of less than $50 million would go from profitable to unprofitable.

It allows scam artists and hackers to steal money from hard-working Americans.

These figures do not really show stability. It would be hard to explain stability.

If you could do that, I would appreciate it very much.

What concern does that give you or should it give all of us?

I have never been entirely comfortable with that dependency, and we have looked at in the budget process options a couple of times to try to do something to remove that dependency.

Specifications have always been my problem. The military and DOD is the only agency that I know of where people get rewarded for adding on and charging more all the time because they do not do what they are supposed to do from the get-go.

What we might think about is changing the law and, carte blanche across all the agencies of the Federal Government, pick a selected pilot project through DOD or Department of Transportation, whatever it might be, and let them pick and…

If we could evaluate what the needs were and with a real-time budget request, then if you over-performed to where you did it less than what we thought it would take, you kept 50 percent of the savings within that department.

I tried my hardest to try to get a cultural change in State government in how we did it.

My concern was that basically men and women in uniform perform the same function, can do it, I think, much more cost-effective and better than anybody else can do it.

I keep looking at cost-effectiveness and just as a private citizen, as a business person, looking at it, would the Guard not be the best bang for our buck in support of our regular Air Force and other Services?

I am interested in the special operations units of the Air National Guard and Reserve.

The Commission recommended extensive use of Air Force Reserve airmen for the cyber mission.

I appreciate that very much, both on domestic and international missions.

I strongly suggest, General and Madam Secretary, that it would be prudent for the Air Force to consider keeping these aircraft at Keesler in order to provide the best value to the warfighter and the taxpayers.

I do not buy the Air Force total force justification for moving the C-130s to Little Rock.

I hope you can see why Senators would be confused by these conflicting statements.

I am convinced that the transfer of C-130Js from Keesler will not actually produce promised financial savings since a new airlift group would have to be physically established at Little Rock.

Integrity is sometimes out of reach.