VIDEO: Capito Discusses Broadband Deployment, NOAA at CJS Subcommittee Hearing

To watch Senator Capito's questioning, click here or the image above.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), a leader on the Senate Appropriations Committee, participated in a Senate Appropriations Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee hearing with Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick to consider President Trump's Fiscal Year 2027 budget request, as well as the many priorities of the agency.

HIGHLIGHTS:

ON NON-DEPLOYMENT FUNDS FOR BEAD: "I'm going to be talking with my broadband council folks tomorrow, and I wish I could give them something more specific on the non-deployment funds. So as soon as that comes, and I hope it will adhere, there are going to be places that are still left uncovered, and there's going to be infrastructure that still needs to be built, and to support the new structures of the future, to keep everybody connected into the future. So, I hope those non-deployment funds can stay within our respective states. So, I'm anxious to hear how you do that"

ON NOAA (NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION):

Senator Capito:

"You mentioned in your written statement, $135 million increase above enacted level for NOAA's shipbuilding and unmanned systems. So, we know they have an aging fleet. They have rising repair needs. They're also new and low cost, rapidly deployable technologies, unmanned systems that are currently available. We ask you to explicitly in the 2026 bill, direct NOAA to integrate these autonomous platforms. So, I'm glad to see you're accelerating that. What kind of execution plan do you have here? And what capabilities are you prioritizing?"

Secretary Lutnick:

"We are very excited about the prospects that we've been discussing on unmanned. The idea of having a hurricane hunter plane fly into hurricanes with people on them, that our older planes just didn't make sense. So, we explored, what are, what is the Department of War and what are the other agencies of the government using? And what we've done is we found, aircraft that they've already ordered, that they're using, that we can fill with our sensors and both get better data at wildly less money and have wildly less risk, because we don't have to have a person in there. So, we are incredibly excited because these vehicles can live inside the hurricane and sort of stay there with much less risk and give us much better data. And we are really excited about the way technology is going to improve our safety of the American people going forward. And I'm going to make sure that that is what, when I leave this office at the end of my term, I'm going to make sure the American people are much, much safer, and they're using technology the best they possibly can."

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF PERMITTING: "I've been very involved in my other responsibilities over on the Environment and Public Works Committee working with my Democrat counterparts there to try to come together for a permitting reform bipartisan bill, which I think many of the projects that you're working on and can expand to would benefit greatly from us coming together on that."

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