The appropriations subcommittee on labor, health, and human services, education and related agencies will come to order. Thank you, secretary azar, for being here. It has turned out to be a more eventful week than we anticipated, but we are grateful you have shown up as we asked to at the time we asked you to. The budget you suggested, the request, many of the same kinds of cuts that occurred in 2020, and i am sure we will have questions about that. It is not unexpected. I think you will recall when i called you with the final budget numbers from the 2020 budget. My first comment was, the good news is you didnt get what you asked for. Hopefully, that will be the case again this time. But you propose a 10 cut, similar cut you proposed in the past in programs that we would be very reluctant in the health care workforces and preparedness programs and research programs, all that we have been about earlier today at the members reading on the current virus. Home energy, rural programs we would be reluctant to discuss. We will need more money this year in my view than the top line number is likely to give us. I do appreciate that in this budget, unlike some in the past, the administration has tried to focus on priorities where we would increase spending, ending the hiv epidemic, the effort to do that, the effort to improve maternal health, the effort to fight the opioid epidemic. Also to maintain some of the other investments we have made, but it also looks at highquality childcare, headstart, and Child Care Development block grants and really suggests that they appreciate what has been allowed in budget in the past to happen there. Many of the increases this budget requests are financed by unrealistic cuts, cuts that we dont want to make, in my opinion, and cuts at the end of the day that you probably wouldnt want us to make, like eliminating Childrens Hospital graduate medical education. That is not going to happen. Eliminating heap, highly unlikely to happen. It proposes a cut in Health Care Research that i think by now, in the last five years ive chaired this committee and senator murray and i have worked together on this topic on this committee, we are not likely to cut Health Care Research. And i hope we can continue our pattern of increasing Health Care Research at this incredible time. I think we have been making a difference. We have seen Life Expectancy numbers go up and quality of life for americans go up with the innovative opportunity in health care. Americans Life Expectancy rose for the First Time Since 2014. Last year, cancer death declined, the first decline in a long time with opioid Overdose Deaths are part of that. New treatments, screening tools, vaccines, all make a difference. This is such an incredible time to move forward in all of those areas based on what we know and what we think is in the future Pr Technology and other things. I know you had to make difficult decisions with the budget number you had and we will have to do the same thing. Hopefully we can Work Together to identify priorities and find Common Ground and hopefully our committee will be able to Work Together, as i think we have made a real effort to do for several years now. Two years ago, this subcommittee created an Infectious Disease fund to provide flexibility funding for the department for immediate response. You have used that money as intended, that first 105 million. I will let you respond to the coronavirus that let you respond to the coronavirus in ways that you wouldnt have otherwise. However, responding to this particular effort not only takes a rapid response, but if we are going to be partners in this, it takes a lot of sharing of information, and i encourage you to continue to do that. We gave you Broad Authority in the Infectious Disease fund, but Broad Authority also includes broad responsibility to be forthcoming with information. When we give you this authority to spend money, i think everyone on this committee would like a similar kind of treatment in your response to how that money is being spent. We have asked virtually every day for the department to give us specifics on spending money with the proposal that came out last night that you and i had a chance to talk about yesterday, i think we have a better sense of the path forward than we would have before. But whether it is your department or omb that makes it hard for you to share information, i just encourage you once again, this is going to work better if we have the kind of sharing that allows you to have the flexibility that you would like to have. Comes, in mythings sense of obligation and the other thing and the sharing of information to be part of that flexibility that we have given you. We are going to talk a lot today, i suspect, or at least i am, this morning about the virus and the supplemental and the time you think the supplemental fills the gap and what the backup plan would be if it is not adequate. I appreciate, secretary, your strong leadership at the cdc, hhs. Ih, and i look forward to your testimony today. We have both the chairman and the vice chairman of the committee with us. I know that senator murray and i are glad to have both of them. I think they will have some comments. Senator murray, lets go to you for your opening comments. Sen. Murray thank you very much for being here. Mr. Secretary, let me just say i am alarmed by the recent developments we have seen in the office of Refugee Resettlement and how it has handled children in its care following president trumps inhumane separation policy. I have raised questions with you before and i hope we can continue that today as we review this administrations budget proposal. I hope we can get a straightforward answer on many of the other healthcare issues i am hearing about from my constituents in washington state. Because when it comes to helping families who are struggling to afford health care, this administration has continually said one thing and done the opposite. At the end of the day, none of the president s empty promises say as much about Health Care Priorities as his decision to champion a partisan lawsuit that could be catastrophic for families, because if republicans get their way in court, they will get protections for they will strike down protections for preexisting conditions, strip away health care for families who got it through exchanges and medicaid expansion, and give power back to the Insurance Companies to