00:00Senator Van Hollen. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. And I will be brief, too. I do think, and I know you understand this, and many of our colleagues do, we're going to have to resolve this issue before we're able to move and proceed through this entire process for fiscal year 26.
00:18You rightly said that the bills coming out of this committee are bipartisan, and they are, but we can only sort of take the let's trust everybody approach for so long. I'm speaking about the administration. The administration, as you know, just today, again, sort of rejected the idea that the only rescissions that we would make are the ones we do in a bipartisan basis through this committee.
00:45They said no. They are planning to propose another one. I would suggest I'm going to support this amendment in committee, but if it's a committee jurisdiction concerned with this amendment, and Senator Merkley may speak to this, we'll have a chance on the floor of the Senate to address this issue if our amendment is made in order, if Senator Merkley's amendments are going to be made in order.
01:08And I hope we would do that at that time, because otherwise, we are facing an unacceptable situation.
01:16I will point out finally that GAO, the independent watchdog, just made another finding today about illegal impoundment with respect to Head Start money.
01:26So, we should fight that collectively, too, illegal impoundments, but at the very least, when it comes to these rescissions, we should not be doing them in a bipartisan, we should be doing them in a, we should be doing them only in a bipartisan way. Thank you, Madam Chair.
