I certainly will be supportive.

I am certainly supportive of that initiative.

I think that has great promise as my understanding is we are not producing those special metals, even though we know they exist in our country and we are importing at great cost.

What kind of resources are you putting into this at the VA to try to meet these challenges?

Broadband access can provide West Virginians with opportunities that lead to new jobs, higher wages, and providing that momentum that our State's economy needs.

I recently introduced the Gigabit Opportunity Act to get to the money issue, which would seek expedited deployment of broadband services in low-income, rural, and urban communities.

Americans should not have to worry that their personal information will be used or shared by their Internet providers without their express consent.

I think the more transparent that you can be, the better.

now is the time to close the digital divide.

Repeatedly placing corporate interests above the interests of consumers and hardworking Americans is unacceptable.

The Gigabit Opportunity, or GO Act, encourages new investment to connect these rural and urban communities.

So the recommendation there would be for us to go back to our respective health officers and make sure that we're gathering statistics, making the case for the greater targeted resources.

I think one of my responses to that might be that this is not a new phenomenon, but a relatively later developing over the course of, say, the last probably 5 or 6 years certainly where we've recognized what's really going on with better…

One of our concerns is that some of the grant funding and other things are formula funded, but we want to see it targeted obviously to the States that have some of the deepest and most devastating problems.

The Department remains committed to working with Congress on the steps we are considering to improve the ability of the Department and USAID to achieve critical foreign policy goals.

I think that rural states like mine are particularly challenged. It needs to be available and affordable for all, and it's not.

the administration has zeroed out the CDBG funds, another source of local economic development funds

NOAA continues to expand its supercomputing resources to meet the agency's rapidly growing high performance computing demands.

I would say, and I think I emphasized this in my statements to you, in our State of West Virginia, we are just now getting EDA to really seed some very good projects.

There is a proposal to cut $27 million from this side.

It seems as though the Department is making this a little bit more difficult. We have some specific examples. I would just like to work with you and the agency to try to iron these differences out.

I am interested in more efficient considerations so that we can make decisions more quickly that are of national interest.

We still have many unmet needs. And so I would like to elicit from you an affirmative that we can keep working with HUD to try to figure out what further damages we might have through the State and with your agency.

You are obviously brushed up on it and I am going to talk about it too from a small State.

Is that a declining number or is it going up? Is it more solvent? I mean we have had to infuse some monies over the last several years into that to keep it going.