dr. cordova and dr. prabhakar and meeting with dr. moniz in a few days and dr. holdren thank you for joining us. i asked the same question the senator blunt just asked and that is what is the number? i gave me the number and i went back and wrote a bill. called the american cures fund. the number you suggest it was real wrote a 5% a year for 10 years. the question is in the biomedical research we committed ourselves to real growth for 10 straight years affecting nih, cdc the department of defense and the veterans administration medical research and how much would it cost and the answer is $140 billion in 10 years total. senator collins brought it up and i'm glad you did. we spend over $200 billion last year on alzheimer's and the notion that we cannot afford to make a 5% commitment when we are spending these math -- massive amounts of money in the wake of human suffering just seems nonsensical. you probably know if you have caught the exchanges that have gone back and forth here there are differences on how to come up with money for research spending. there are

dr. cordova. >> thank you. madam chair, ranking member shelby, members of the committee, and senator cochran with who i have worked. i want to thank you for the opportunity to testify about the national science foundation and the critical role that plays in keeping the nation at the forefront of the world's science and engineering enterprise. it is personally grad identifying for me to appear before you as nsf director because full disclosure, i have had the pleasure of testifying in the presence of senator mccull ski before. almost two decades ago i was at the witness table as the chief scientist, in this role i encouraged scientists to never us pas the biggest challenges the agency could tackle. they identified trying to understand the origin of the universe through observation, identifying habitable planets orbiting other suns and visiting the neighborhoods of our sun and planets to better understand their nature and origins, and today, they have certainly made a lot of progress on all of those big challenge