Tom Carper

I think certainly consulting with Congress in that process would be very important and valuable.

When you are running a budget deficit, in the last 8 years we ran up as much new debt as we did in the first 208 years of our Nation's history, this year on track to our biggest budget deficit ever, and if we look forward to the next 10…

What we are working on just down the hall in the next building is, I think, of historic consequence.

Unless you are keeping score, you are just practicing.

A plane that we have been building all these years, its mission-capable rate is down around 50 percent, where we spend, I think, about $40,000 per flight hour for the aircraft that has never flown a single mission in Iraq or Afghanistan…

That is a good story. Thank you.

Say that one more time.

Those are just a few of the exceptional challenges that our country, including our government, needs to be prepared to address.

This is important stuff, and we are going to do better. We have got to do better as a Nation and as a government.

But we did use pretty good performance data, and I think it was instructive and helpful to my colleagues as they made the tough decisions for some of them.

I think OMB can play a part here by putting our energy toward training and education and sharing best practices.

I am optimistic. There is a lot of good stuff in place.

GAO has previously recommended that OMB should work with agencies to ensure they are making adequate investments in training on performance planning and measurements.

He has inherited an economic crisis that has required unprecedented international cooperation to jump-start the world's economies.

The President and the Congress can play vital roles in setting the tone at the top and communicating to agency leaders that performance matters.

Since coming into office, President Obama has faced--I think it is an understatement--a complicated set of challenges, both domestic and international.

It would not leave much of a future for your kids or for mine or for any of our children.

All right. A different question, a different area. As you know, progress has been made in recent years in improving the quality and, I think, the timeliness of agencies' financial statements.

The work that we are doing here, this is real money.

Good. Well, I want you to tackle it, and I thank you.

I am pleased that the President has sent us such a qualified candidate for this position.

Have you all given some thought and attention to another related concern, and that is with respect to agencies making decisions to lease property as opposed to purchasing it?

This year, we are on track to run up the biggest single-year deficit ever.

Was it Richard Nixon who used to say that the only people who do not make mistakes are people who do not do anything?

And I would just hope, as we extend the three-state demonstration for Medicare cost recovery to the other 47 States, that we will begin preparing to extend the same kind of cost-recovery approach to Medicaid.