There are noises from the administration that they are to release a sweeping energy plan. Are sweeping changes the way to go?

I hope that what you will see from the science committee is a lot of narrow-issue, bipartisan, good-government initiatives. My thought is that we could sit around here and talk round and round about energy independence for two, or three, or four years, and not get anything done. I don't want to hold up any good ideas we might have to put into a major bill if we can get them through on their own. Let's do smaller steps that we can get done.

Give me an example.

We are going to start with the education initiatives. There is a consensus that the United States has got to raise its capabilities in math and science. If we are going to have the jobs of the future, we need a higher-skilled workforce. The real problem is that approximately two-thirds of the math teachers in this country have neither a major nor a certification in that area. Compared with other countries, our students do worse the longer they are in school. The National Academies report lays out programmes to change this, and I'd like to see them put in place.

Does NASA have its priorities right? Do you feel that a realistic number has been put on the cost of sending humans to Mars?

I would like to see NASA do all that it is proposing and more. But we need to do a better job of oversight. I want to see if all of the numbers add up, and frankly I don't think they will. If they don't, we will have to take a hard look at priorities. I don't want to pass problems on to others. What we have seen with NASA is that prior administrators just keep on passing on problems. Someone needs to take oversight.

You've talked about censorship of scientists at agencies and politicization of science. Do you plan any hearings on that issue?

We hope that we can have some oversight hearings that are going to find out what was really going on. My goal is not to embarrass the administration but to shed some light on this problem so that people will be embarrassed to do it again.