I certainly hope we will keep that concern in mind as we consider the three nominees before us today.

Thanks so much, Mr. Chairman, Senators Hatch and Grassley and our colleagues.

the President has made not just a wise choice in nominating Virginia Seitz for this position, but I think he had made an extraordinary choice

As my colleagues know, I believe very strongly that the office betrayed its historic high standards during the previous administration.

Just about every day we see more violence along our border with Mexico. I think we are partly to blame for that.

Unfortunately, the Senate recently has lagged in the latter regard. The Deputy Attorney General is a key operational leader within the Department of Justice, but the current nominee has been denied a vote for almost 1 year.

We need to change the culture from one of what I describe as spendthrift to a culture of thrift.

Just briefly characterize those conversations.

That is not the kind of behavior that taxpayers expect, and that is not what they should get.

One of the questions I often ask of witnesses, particularly when we see a real problem, $402 billion worth in cost overruns, what can we do to help?

Systemic cost growth jeopardizes the ability of the United States to execute a long-term, coherent, and stable strategy.

We actually pay the providers up front. Then we figure out it was wrong, and mistake, and then chase them down and try to get the money back.

Sometimes when we hold these oversight hearings, we focus on disappointing performance, bad actors, that sort of thing.

An ounce of prevention, as my grandmother used to say, 'Is worth a pound of cure.'

For every dollar you would put into developing more technology, you would probably save a lot more money in product development.

None of us escape blame. And if we are going to turn this around, all of us have a role to play.

My hope is that we continue to do our oversight in the years to come, and if we extend that bar graph or bar chart a couple years forward into the future that we will see not only a plateauing, but we will see those numbers coming back…

We have to do better than this. Otherwise, we will end up having $1.5 trillion deficits for as far as the eye can see. We cannot afford that.

We ended up with a balanced budget approach that worked on the defense side, defense spending, worked on domestic discretionary spending, worked on entitlements, and also revenues.

I would rather spend the money, quite frankly, going after the people that have either breached the contract or not performed instead of just saying here is the check, we are going to close you down.

It is great of you to come, and we applaud your continued efforts here.

When you say poor performance, by the contractor?

When we have seen major weapon systems cost overruns rise from $42 billion in fiscal year 2000 to $402 billion in fiscal year 2010, we have a problem.

Now, more than ever we have to find the best value for our tax dollars, and I am amazed as I stay here longer as to how much we actually waste and how we do things and how we really should be doing it better.

Again, we are in debt to each of you. We appreciate very much your preparation for today and your participation here today and in previous years.