our diplomatic activities are woefully underfunded, undermanned and underutilized. we must rebuild our diplomatic capacity to meet the needs of our increasingly complex global relations. diplomatic, economic and social assistance is a much wiser and less expensive investment than war. rather than relying on either hard power or soft power we must instead emphasize smart power. promoting democracy, human rights, the rule of law and the development of civil societies is a matter of leadership requiring us to think beyond unilateral military solutions and to instead embrace a much more comprehensive approach to our relations with the international community. this rule enables us to consider legislation to do just that. the first legislation on this rule, the foreign relations act, advances crucial and lottable programs. the department of state is authorized to hire more than 1,500 foreign service officers ensuring that our overseas posts will be staffed with eager and knowledgeable workers committed to promoting american culture, values and policies. critical multilate

fact, the dispatchability of renewable resources would suggest you would have a significant underutilization of the transmission line unless you filled it with other forms of generation. so a green transmission line would give market advantage to any power plant fortunate enough to be close to the new line. third, creating a new, planning process across the region is unnecessary. we already have regional planning processes that are effective and sensitive to local concerns. cross-regional issues should be addressed from approved coordination between regional planning bodies which is exactly the approach taken in the committee with the bill. finally, existing tools can help renewable projects connect to the grid without distorting price signals and without potentially burdening customers with an excess of expensive transmission. for example, if the cost of connecting to the grid are too much for one developer to bear, multiple developers can share costs among their projects or ferc can require that rate payers initially bear these costs provided they're reimbursed by developers after the proj