Mr. Chairman, I'd like to make a couple of suggestions.
The first is regarding witness time. I know--and there is at least one other member who has sat on committees for 13 years in the House--that invariably we find that witnesses have trouble keeping to the allotted time. I see the suggestion was to have 10 minutes for each witness. I'd like to suggest that it be reduced to five minutes and that witnesses be required to provide an executive brief for the members of the committee to follow while they're talking. I think that 10 minutes per witness is a considerable length of time, and if you have, say, five or six witnesses, that is an hour of presentations before you get back to the very first one to ask questions.
I'd like to suggest that we reduce the witness presentations to five minutes, and increase the first round of questioning to seven minutes. That would kind of compensate for that and give the witnesses a little more time in the first round. That way, if you have six witnesses, you would get to the first one with questions in 30 minutes rather than in an hour, and the information would probably be a lot fresher.